Chapter 75 – Collusion (1)

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Translated by Jinmu

Read only at Novelbyu.com & Utoon.net

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As I lay there with my head propped on one hand, staring at the ceiling, I was once again reminded of how quickly time passed at the academy.

When I had first moved into the room, everything had been pure white, but before I knew it, it had yellowed with the traces of daily life.

Beads of sweat formed along my hairline. The chill of the early summer nights had long since passed, and the tropical-night heat made it impossible to sleep.

“Ha, what kind of dorm doesn’t even have air conditioning?”

Letting out a hot breath, I pushed myself upright. The bedsheet had grown damp along the line of my body.

I took off my shirt and tossed it into the laundry hamper. The cloth made an unpleasant splat when it landed in the basket.

“Hot, so damn hot.”

The cicadas screamed all through the night as if mocking me. There were two of them. It sounded like they were mating in the middle of the night.

Clicking my tongue shortly, I sat down at the desk. A pencil spun between my index finger and thumb like a pinwheel.

Now that I had gotten used to the desk, I really did look exactly like a student. Not that I was actually studying.

“…What comes next is what matters.”

Words were written across the open notebook. I had jotted down fragments of thought whenever I found the time.

‘The academy’s Elder Council. ☐’

‘The mysterious female instructor. ☐’

——————-

‘The Sword God. ☐’

‘G.M. ☐’

I was not someone who idly played with a pencil often, so there were not many entries. Even so, since I had written only the essentials, it was easy enough to read.

I slowly moved my eyes as though savoring the texture of the letters. The dotted line drawn in the middle marked the boundary that separated one train of thought from another.

Above was reality, below was the dream.

I coolly pushed aside the lower half. Once I had already given up on sleep because of the tropical night, I decided to postpone abstract words until later. I raised my eyes back to the top and muttered.

“The Elder Council said Auditore would handle the investigation on their own.”

Even among fellow aristocrats, the concentration of elitist thinking differed. The ones who could be called the pinnacle of that ideology were the Elder Council. In their eyes, even the house of order, Auditore, would be nothing more than a pack of mongrels.

And yet they had asked them, without even a proper pretext, to kill a single cadet? It was only natural that Auditore would be furious at being treated like hunting dogs.

Thanks to that, I had unintentionally gained Auditore as an ally.

“There isn’t really a more dependable ally than them.”

As a former player, I knew very well what happened if you made an enemy of Auditore.

There was an episode in the middle to late part of the story where you could see Auditore’s true colors.

I did not remember the exact circumstances, but if I dug through my memory, it felt like the situation had been roughly similar to now.

Had the Elder Council been making covert moves against the protagonist Leon, only to get caught red-handed by Auditore? Something like that. In any case, there had been exactly one time when they stepped out of the shadows and into the open.

At first, the Elder Council had only sneered.

They probably never imagined that a dirty family whose hands were stained with blood would dare dig into them.

But the hands of a group devoted to order recognized neither rank nor status. In the end, not only the Elder Council but even the nobles beneath them lost their heads one after another.

Because of that, by the latter half of the story, there was no one left to put the brakes on Leon. With the Elder Council, the ringleaders of power, purged, what fool would still dare resist?

The Elder Council being purged by Auditore was the game’s own brand of catharsis.

Auditore did the bloodstained work in Leon’s place, with Leon serving as the player’s stand-in. It was the game company’s thoughtful little gesture.

Thinking of it that way, my mood suddenly twisted.

‘Fuck, and here I am suffering like a dog.’

My brow furrowed. The crushing heat made the crown of my head feel hot.

I shook my head to cast off the heat and scribbled with the pencil.

‘The academy’s Elder Council. ☑’

Let me be satisfied that one troublesome burden had been eased. Since Auditore had stepped in, the truth would be uncovered soon enough. I would learn who was behind it when the time came.

“The one that remains is…”

‘The mysterious female instructor. ☐’

Unlike the Elder Council, this was a person whose inner circumstances had not been revealed at all. I only had a vague idea of her appearance, and even that was not exact.

It was only suspicion, but I had already judged that female instructor to be a villain. The outline had become clearer after the deserted-island survival training.

‘Anyway, I gave him a contract because he kept whining, and that bastard still handled the job like this.’

Those words from Fifth Legion Commander Agor were proof enough.

If the female instructor really was a villain, then she could probably alter her outward appearance with magic. But even that convenient trick had clear limits.

“You can’t change your sex or the color of your eyes.”

Even if it was magic, the variability of outward appearance could not become infinitely versatile.

That was an obvious fact I knew from experience gained through playing the game.

Fortunately, the time when I quit Miracle’s Blessing M overlapped with the appearance of Ray Shion, the first villain, so I remembered it.

Ray Shion had disguised himself as one of Leon’s female acquaintances to stab him in the back. But his identity had been exposed because Leon noticed the difference in iris color.

“Purple eyes, and definitely a woman.”

The problem was that there were too many of them. I wanted to gauge the opponent by operating the Blessing’s sensitivity, but I still lacked knowledge of magic.

That said, I had neither the desire nor the time to hole up in the library flipping through introductory books on magic.

Admiral Yi Sun-sin, the Saint of Heroes, had said that if you knew your enemy and knew yourself, you would win a hundred battles.

But the breadth of learning I would need to acquire just to understand my enemy was too vast. If Admiral Yi Sun-sin himself had known about the concept of magic, might he not had withdrawn those words?

“I’m not doing all this just to end up studying…”

My head was in chaos.

‘Should I just wait outright until the enemy makes a move?’

Maybe waiting for the other side to come first was also a method. In short, endurance.

If I waited, there was a good chance they would grow restless and show themselves.

This was an opponent difficult to measure. If I foolishly stirred the hive, I might end up being stung.

Rather than making the first move, waiting for the right time was the adult way of doing things, tempered by experience and objectivity.

“What do I do.”

The night deepened. The weight of my scattered thoughts made my head feel heavy. Moonlight shone faintly through the crack in the window.

Tap, tap.

I poked at the notebook with the pencil as I organized my thoughts.

The extension of that train of thought stretched on and on.

Whenever one thing brushed through my mind, my unconscious drew another dot. In that way, the blank page filled with white and black dots.

‘◎●○●○●●○○●●○○○●’

The traces of a mind trying to sort itself out. It looked like some pattern I might have seen before.

Chirrrr!

The heated cries of the birds’ pleasure stabbed into my ears. Summer was the overture to the business of youth.

Those little birds, as if assisting in that cause, cried out filled with lust and excitement.

I let out a short laugh. At first it had irritated me, but thanks to them I managed to put a period on my thoughts.

‘The mysterious female instructor. ☑’

I scribbled with the pencil once, then tossed it onto the notebook.

The pencil failed to settle and rolled off onto the floor.

“Since when did I start twirling pencils?”

Waiting for the right time might be the wise way adults talked about. But the blood running through every corner of the body I had now was young blood.

Recklessness and courage were separated by only the thinnest margin. Now was the time to summon courage.

I recalled the memories of my previous life. I had bent at the waist in folder-style bows to customers and had to let even unpleasant remarks roll off me with calm composure.

Maybe because that had become a habit, even in this world I still showed a passive attitude toward everything. But this time I intended to knock first.

To catch them off guard. It was my chance to overturn the board.

“I should go see Professor Damian before long.”

Professor Damian of the Blessings Department. He had told me before to come to his lab if I ever had questions.

For some reason, he was a professor who showed me considerable goodwill.

He would probably make up for my lack of knowledge. Rather than making my unused head suffer, I should lean on an expert.

Chirrrr!

The cries of pleasure. They had been battering my ears nonstop for a while now.

“These little bastards need to stop after the first verse.”

I grabbed Permafrost, which I had received from Mansur a few days ago. Perhaps because of the name I had given it, the heat vanished in an instant and the bird cries cut off abruptly.

* * *

At dawn in Hoakin Academy, when the sounds had ceased.

Roughly ten figures in black hoods gathered inside an abandoned building.

It was a suspicious secret meeting in a dim place that stank of mold. Those who had hidden their faces in the shadows of their hoods stood in a circle. In the stillness and silence, only their eyes moved.

From a gardener caked in dirt, to people in instructor uniforms, to even a white robe worn by professors. Without speaking, they estimated one another’s cover identities only from their clothes.

Step, step.

A man dressed in a professor’s robe walked out into the center. After sweeping his gaze over the people present, he opened his mouth.

“I’m sure you’re all busy, so thank you for coming despite the difficulty. Please feel free to call me simply Professor.”

There was a refined quality in the man’s voice. It almost sounded as though he were admonishing them.

“Enough of that. Professor or whatever, what the hell is this about, calling us out so suddenly? If somebody catches us all gathered here like this, are you going to take responsibility?”

A man with a beard sticking out from beneath his hood spoke sharply. The others silently agreed with him. Their eyes fixed on the Professor were cold enough to sting.

“Puhahahahahahahahahahaha!”

The Professor burst out laughing. The sound was so loud that it echoed murkily through the hollow building.

“Hey, you bastard! Are you crazy?! What the fuck are you laughing for all of a sudden!”

The bearded man shouted without even realizing it. Killing intent flashed across his shadowed face.

Villains were beings who had sold away their humanity. They had long ago forgotten how to control their emotions.

He immediately rolled up his sleeves and poured magic into his body. At the same time, sharp stone spikes sprouted along the muscles of his arm.

“You call us in all of a sudden and then sit there cackling? Fine. My hands were dry anyway. It’s been a while since I got to stain them with some blood, fucker!”

The force of his momentum was savage. One direct hit would open several holes through a whole body. But the Professor only stroked his chin as he observed.

“Ho, a subordinate of Fourth Legion Commander Permash. Earth-attribute magic is not common, after all. But you are foolish. Use this chance to prove your worth by becoming one of my specimens.”

The Professor smiled smoothly. The rest watched, as though intending to see how the situation would play out.

“What the hell are you talking about, you bastard playing dress-up as a professor!”

Booom!

When the bearded man stamped his foot, the floor burst apart. The shards that flew up clung around his body like magnets.

‘I don’t know what that bastard’s magic is, but…’

He narrowed his eyes through the stone helm. The Professor’s attitude was far too relaxed. But the man was confident.

‘The best defense is absolute offense.’

Even an ordinary lump of stone, when combined with earth-attribute magic, could approach the hardness of diamond.

The rough calculation in his head was already finished.

‘I’ll just ram straight through him.’

There would be a great noise, but even if someone came rushing in, he could simply kill them on the spot.

Think simply, think simply. Living by entrusting yourself to impulse and stimulation, that was the villain’s way.

The man’s foot gouged into the earth once more.

Kwagwagwang!

With a tearing sound, the man swept the rubble up and charged like a rhinoceros. Several hoods fluttered in the gust of dust. The others pulled farther back.

“I’ll punch some air holes into your face!”

With a line worthy of a true villain, he slammed into the Professor. His fist ringed with dense spikes came within immediate reach.

At that moment, the Professor’s expression came into view. Dark red eyes flickering, and a fishy smile. That was the last thing the man would ever remember from this world.

Bang!

A concise tearing sound through the air. Then the bearded man’s body slid limply away.

The eyes watching widened in disbelief. In an instant, the cauldron of chaos cooled.

With a thud, blood spurted from the shoulders where a head should have been.

“Hoo.”

The Professor steadied his breathing. Then he turned his gaze to the witnesses of the slaughter.

Without warning, he placed one hand on his chest and gave a slight bow. It was a formality utterly unsuited to the situation.

“That should do for introductions, so shall we move on to the main point? Do you all agree?”

At those words, the entire group remained silent. Displeasure showed on their mouths, but no one spoke.

The magic the Professor had displayed made the same name rise in all their minded.

‘Second Legion Commander, Quarn.’

Fear swept across all their spines at once. The Professor’s mouth curved into a fishy arc.

“I’m glad your comprehension is good. The reason I called you here, as you all know, is because of the passing of Fifth Legion Commander Agor.”

His expression stiffened as he gestured toward a woman wearing an instructor’s uniform.

“Please step forward, Cadet, no, Instructor. I’ve held the teaching baton so long that calling people cadets has become habitual. In any case, she will explain the details.”

Saying that, the Professor yielded his place to the female instructor. The moment she walked to the center, her mouth opened.

“…I’ll speak only to the point.”

There was an edge in the eyes looking out at them. With an air of half-resignation, she moved her lips.

“Contrary to what the world believes, my lord was not killed by the Sword Emperor.”

“……”

Her gaze remained fixed on the Professor. Leaning against the wall, he gave a small nod.

“Lord Agor was killed by the hand of a single cadet. His name is…”

The female instructor paused. The space left by her words felt heavy.

“Leon van Reinhardt, the next Hero.”

The Professor smiled brightly.