Children of the Rune – Winterer - Chapter 575

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Episode 27.
The Noble Daughter and the Detective (27)
Since I’d started speaking, I had to finish properly. Maximian hastily blurted out whatever came to mind.
“Two hundred thousand Elso should cover it. How’s that?”
Langie spread both hands and smiled broadly.
“At that rate, I’d have to run off with it tonight.”
Did I know this fellow had such a sense of humor? Maximian waved his hand dismissively and left the research lab while speaking.
“Fine, fine. Since I gave you a hint, go ahead and run off—just wrap up one hundred thousand Elso nicely and send it to me, understood? Keep the chocolate-syrup-covered pistol for yourself. Are we definitely doing this tonight?”
Espin was walking through the crossroads of Heimachi Village again. She had just finished dinner at one of the village’s two inns. It was still early enough to stay at the inn, but it seemed she ought to see the village while she could. If things went well, she might not even need to enroll and could leave tomorrow morning.
Of the roughly thirty houses in Heimachi, nearly half were shops catering to students. In other words, they reflected the tastes of Nenyaple students quite thoroughly. What Espin was curious about was the Nenyaple students themselves.
She’d heard that hundreds of people from different nations and stations left their homelands and came all the way to this mountain to take difficult entrance exams and enroll. After that, they lived in dormitories for several years, becoming close and quarreling, then scattered in all directions after graduation. They would rarely meet again. Yet while at Nenyaple, they studied together without much discrimination. Sharing the same worries, fretting over the same exams, buying the same snacks.
Such a place probably existed nowhere else on the entire continent except Nenyaple. Only the authority of the special discipline of magic and Nenyaple’s centuries-old tradition allowed people to set aside status differences and accept being treated as classmates. Currently, Nenyaple had a young minor noble from House of Arnim, one of Anomarad’s two dukes, while also having quite a few commoners with no family name to speak of. What would the atmosphere be like in a lecture hall where they sat together?
From childhood, Espin had been raised in Etoile, then as a noble daughter of the Grand Duchy, always rushing toward concrete goals and never doubting such a life. She thought that since she was born this way, it had to be this way; avoiding it was cowardly escapism. She also believed that while circumstances differed from person to person, everyone carried burdens of that magnitude. Yet there existed a place where quite brilliant young people spent years free from their inherited responsibilities, devoted solely to scholarship. Like some strange separate world.
She had no real intention of enrolling, nor did she have the leisure for it, but imagining herself forgetting the Orlanne affair and mingling with them stirred something slightly anxious yet thrilling within her. What did the students here think about as they spent each day? What if they hadn’t finished studying for tomorrow’s exam, what would lunch be, could one really spend a day thinking only of such things?
Just thinking about it made her face flush, so Espin quickly shook her head and cast off the thoughts. Perhaps it was a misunderstanding. Surely they didn’t think like this every day? It would be better to ask them directly. Of course, not that fellow from earlier—someone more sensible.
But she couldn’t just grab anyone and bluntly ask, “What’s it like being a Nenyaple student?” So she postponed the questions and decided to walk through the village as if she were a Nenyaple student herself. Espin wasn’t the type to be drawn to aimless rebellion, but she had a richer imagination than appearances suggested. Besides, this hardly qualified as rebellion, did it?
However, once the hour when students would return had passed, the shops had nearly all closed and the streets were not merely quiet but utterly empty, creating a gap that imagination alone couldn’t fill. Espin walked back and forth across the crossroads twice with her chin raised, then gave up with a slightly sullen expression. The broad crossroads in this mountain village probably existed because of logistics to and from Nenyaple; it must be quite a lucrative spot, she analyzed in such tedious fashion.
After circling around, she found herself back in front of the Orange Tree Tavern. The tavern door was closed. Orange Buck must have left early to recover from his emotional shock. When Espin reached the backyard after circling the tavern, she suddenly stopped. Staring at the massive rock that had sprouted inside the courtyard, too large to have been removed.
“There you were.”
Her tone was as if she’d encountered a well-known friend. The rock didn’t budge, but Espin stared at it intently for a long time. Then the rock slid smoothly and vanished beneath the earth. As if it had never existed from the start. A faint tremor was felt beneath her feet.
Orange Buck would be quite shocked if he came to the backyard tomorrow, but Espin had no intention of surprising the old man. She still didn’t fully understand why Psyche sometimes approached and sometimes fled. There was still no communication whatsoever. What was certain for Espin was only the power to find Psyche and eliminate it.
Espin steadied her breathing for a moment. Once the tremor beneath her feet subsided, she pursed and unpursed her lips as if to calm herself, then reached into the bag she was carrying diagonally and pulled out a glass bottle. It was a jar of Lindiz pickles.
While waiting for Maximian Lipkne at the crossroads during the day, eight out of every ten Nenyaple students coming down from school had bought this pickle. Watching them, she grew increasingly curious. It seemed to be the most popular snack at Nenyaple—surely it had a special taste?
So she’d ventured into the Lindiz shop, but being new and with so many varieties, she didn’t know what to choose. So she said, “Please give me the best-selling one.”
That was the worst possible choice for an outsider, but the shop owner said nothing. There was an unwritten rule: anyone who ordered like that was definitely a new student, and when giving a first-time customer their first Lindiz pickle, you never offered any guidance.
Since she’d already eaten dinner, she felt like trying one last challenge to cap off her Nenyaple student roleplay. What flavor could possibly be so popular?
Opening the bottle and placing a pickle in her mouth, Espin suddenly furrowed her brow and pressed her lips tightly together, then inhaled sharply through her nose. Debating whether to spit it back out. But the thought of spitting out food she was eating collided seriously with her sense of propriety as a noble daughter. Though no one was watching.
After a long while, having somehow chewed and swallowed it, Espin snapped the bottle cap shut and wiped her tears while muttering.
“I’m definitely not enrolling in a school like this.”
4. November Night’s Zombie Horde
Rushing to the dining hall just before closing right after leaving Professor Ostley’s research lab, Maximian finished his dinner in seven minutes out of consideration for the staff preparing to leave, while organizing what he would tell Espin tomorrow.
‘I like money too, but if the Nenyaple professor says he can’t give it because the world might end? If you really want it, I’ll arrange a meeting for you.’
That would be precisely the right level of mediation for Maximian to step back from. Of course, the money was regrettable, but if he stole something so dangerous and gave it to someone, and an explosion happened somewhere—how could he handle the aftermath?
Just as he finished eating, having reached such a rational conclusion, Maximian suppressed his remaining regret with a single wrinkle of his nose and turned his steps toward the dormitory. But after walking a few steps, he tilted his head. Something in his pants pocket was bothering him now. What was this?
Reaching in, he grasped an envelope. Now that he thought about it, he’d completely forgotten about the letter Orange Buck had given him. The afternoon had been too spectacular to remember it. When he pulled it out, the letter was so thick he wondered how it had been folded.
Maximian tried to recall who might have written him such a lengthy letter, but even combining all possibilities, he couldn’t think of half a person. Since it was growing dark, Maximian walked a few more steps and held the envelope up to a streetlight near the dormitory. Seeing the characters “Maximian Lipkne, Personal” written on the front, something felt slightly off. This oddly antiquated feeling and handwriting… somehow familiar. It was stirring unpleasant memories.
Flipping it over to see the sender’s name, it read:
E. Juspian
Suddenly, cold sweat ran down Maximian’s spine. Juspian?
Juspian had sent him a letter?
If Maximian’s friend Tichiel Juspian’s name were abbreviated, it would be T. Juspian, so he wasn’t the one who sent the letter. They weren’t even in a romantic relationship, and there was no reason to bother writing a letter when they lived in dormitories across from each other. Maximian stared at the name written on the envelope before muttering softly to himself.
“Tichiel has a father, you see….”
That man’s name was Alberic Juspian—none other than Maximian’s benevolent patron. He paid an astronomical tuition fee, yet required no thank-you letters, no need to maintain a B average, and never even stopped by on passing—the ideal sort of patron, really.
Even Maximian, who lacked the habit of seeing life’s bright side, had found this particular arrangement quite gratifying. For three years, he’d had no worries about food or shelter. But examining the darker aspect: Juspian had his own agenda. He intended to make Maximian into a mage. That’s why from the beginning he’d arbitrarily written a letter of recommendation to the Headmaster, proposing that admission be granted through interview alone.
Of course, Maximian had politely declined, asking how he could accept such generosity without any compensation. But Juspian was not a man whom polite refusals could sway.
“What? You dare refuse my offer? You presumptuous brat? Fine then. It’s free! I’ll cover your entire tuition! I’ll give you spending money! I’ll buy you clothes and books! Surely you can’t refuse even that?”
He hadn’t actually said it quite like that… but it wasn’t substantially different. Juspian had urgent reasons for turning Maximian into a mage. Urgent, at least by his own standards.
But Maximian had no such reasons. Magic? Why should I waste my mind on something so tedious and uninteresting?
However, the school provided dormitory housing and meals. As a penniless man, Maximian decided to focus on the attractive aspects of the offer. That’s right—free food and shelter. Study and take exams too? That’s what students are supposed to do, but what’s it to me?
Therefore, by his own reckoning, Maximian—not even truly a “Nenyaple student”—was meant to spend a leisurely year eating and sleeping in the unnecessarily vast Nenyaple dormitory, taking walks, and then being expelled. But by accident, he’d submitted a fourth-grade answer sheet on the first-year final exam. He should have written something spectacularly stupid to guarantee a fifth grade, but his friend had hidden all the alcohol bottles the night before….
So this year, he’d done it properly. This time, a fifth grade was certain. As that thought crossed his mind, doubt crept in. Had Juspian somehow discovered this? He’d never once asked to see the grade report until now, had he?

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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