How to Survive as the Second Son of a Mage Family - Chapter 339

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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How to Survive as the Second Son of a Magic Family (339)

 

Luca’s words echoed in my ears. I couldn’t believe what I had heard. You’re alive until now because of me? You, Luca?

 

“Elias, you might not believe this, but what if I had known you even before we became friends?”

 

Luca’s clear voice spread through the night air. It sounded inexplicably surreal, and a vague fear I had never felt before rose in my chest. I waved my hand awkwardly, knowing I looked foolish.

 

“You always knew me! I knew you too. …Through Pleroma, I mean. And that’s not really knowing each other, is it? We just heard each other’s names through the grapevine. We first met and became friends in our second year of high school~”

 

“…”

 

Luca smiled in a way he had never shown me before. Ah. I recognized the emptiness contained in that expression. It was the same look I used to wear as a child; to Leo, Father, and Julia who asked after my well-being when I returned from suffocating experiences, to my few friends.

 

“Elias, I’m hiding many things from you. Not just from you, but from everyone.”

 

I know.

 

Luca had always been like that. He always knew information we couldn’t know, couldn’t explain it to us, and crucially, he had actually succeeded using those solutions. He also always spoke as if he was certain of our future. How could I not be curious? Could anyone not be curious? Did you not trust me, or had you shouldered a heavy burden alone to obtain that information, making it impossible to speak of it…? Truly, there had been more than one or two times when I wanted to grab Luca’s shoulders and shake him vigorously!

 

But I couldn’t do that. A person’s heart was not something that could be achieved by my will. Everything flows according to time, and everything I believed I possessed changes like sand clutched in my hand, scattering and flying to places I cannot see. Following the lineage of my thoughts like the philosophers including Marcus Aurelius and ancient epics, my uncle Friedrich Hohenzollern had long ago taught me that nothing in the world goes according to my will. My first magic teacher taught me powerlessness and showed me that thorough malice could destroy a child’s talent. My father, with his weak and timid nature, tearfully revealed that he might have to go into exile because of his child’s existence. My literature teacher, displaying his characteristic pettiness and aggression, taught me that even with just one volume of the Iliad, one could completely uproot a child’s interest in words and writing. My relatives of various ages showed me how servile absolute obedience to power looked, and demonstrated what kind of people power was protected and strengthened by. The world demanded that I be completed by what I had learned.

 

I had long since surpassed my teacher in magic. Sing, goddess, of rage—I love the dusty, stifling atmosphere of the Iliad, like the dust clouds spreading behind chariots. I now had the leisure to pity Father, whose lifeline was held in my benevolent brother’s hands, and to sadly regard the blue veins on his wrists that were beginning to wrinkle. I neither blamed nor defended my numerous relatives who were typical opportunists. I became myself, leaving behind the countless memories that had fed and raised me since I was a suckling infant.

 

Uncle was right. Just as the world did not bend to my will, the world also could not make me submit to its will. Just as I had directly refused to become what the things surrounding me wanted me to become, this was no different anywhere else. Others’ hearts also did not bend to my will. My life consisted entirely of resistance against hostility, making me practically illiterate when it came to winning people’s hearts. Therefore, when it came to winning a friend’s heart, I might have needed to put down my rebellious experiences and approach it differently, but I believed this much was common. I didn’t need to force what I wanted onto Luca. I had to wait for Luca to come to me. If his heart was like mine, he would someday gather his own heart and tell me everything. When all things work together appropriately.

 

“I will have to keep hiding it from you all in the future. Unless circumstances force me to, I cannot tell anyone that fact. Nothing would benefit from revealing it. Beyond that, perhaps our relationship might race toward the worst. You’d want to ask why I think that, wouldn’t you?”

 

I could see the movement of the water’s surface reflected beneath Luca’s transparent eyes. Luca held something in his mouth that he had to hide. He spoke with a smile close to resignation.

 

“I also know this isn’t right. This wasn’t my will, and I still don’t know how this came to be.”

 

“…”

 

“Won’t everything return to the starting point someday? Even if I no longer want to go back, wouldn’t that be right? Because that’s the natural order, I believe so. Regardless of what I’ve come to love.”

 

Where are you talking about going back to? What do you mean is irrelevant when you say you’ve come to love something? Whatever news you bring, I won’t abandon you. We can’t go back to the starting point now. The dense trust you’ve shown in this short time is already intensely embedded in me—would that even be possible now? For a hundred-and-eighteen-year-old me, a few months would be repetition of inertia, moments that barely graze the skin without reaching the heart, but for an eighteen-year-old me, that much time is never insufficient to become the foundation of a lifetime. I will recall what happened in my eighteenth spring every time I overcome the brink of death in the future. Even after decades pass, even after centuries pass… Elias thought this while quietly listening. Luca had just said he couldn’t tell us anything, but that wasn’t true. This, all of these words were Luca’s confession. He was clumsily telling me stories he had never shared anywhere else.

 

“Of course, it’s just baseless speculation. Since my power wasn’t involved from the beginning, the end isn’t in my hands either. I’m just waiting for an unknowable future while having to avoid the death that will come around graduation. For whatever reason. I can’t just let go and allow others who have already been robbed of free will because of me to die meaningless deaths, and I also can’t let myself die by someone else’s hand when I could die by my own. No matter how much I might wish for an end, I don’t want to entrust myself to someone whose hand I didn’t choose.”

 

“…”

 

“But I don’t know how to reverse this, Elias. I also have no idea how this happened. So… I apologize in advance. I wasn’t trying to deceive you.”

 

I opened my mouth at the moisture in his words. But contrary to my brief thought, Luca’s eyes didn’t waver. He was gazing at me quietly like a tree deeply rooted in the earth.

 

“I can’t reveal exactly what I’m apologizing for right now, but I wanted to tell you at least this much.”

 

Luca smiled faintly with eyes that seemed to be recalling something, then continued after a moment.

 

“Elias, I’m alive until now because of you. Choosing your story at the last moment was the best thing I ever did in my life.”

 

I feel the weight of words I never thought I could handle. Luca says he has lived until now by watching the trajectory of my life. What could that mean?

 

“You chose.”

 

A faint question escaped my lips.

 

“I admired you in times you don’t know, hoped you would win, and wished for your happiness more than anyone else in this world. You overcame everything I failed at, and showed me how every moment I failed could somehow lead to victory. It’s similar to what you said to me earlier. Isn’t it?”

 

Had Luca always been receiving news about me? No, it’s not at that level. As he already said, there must be a story he can’t tell me entangled here. Whatever secret Luca held didn’t matter. I focused on the time when Luca was opening up about himself.

 

“You thought I was someone who could make anything possible. That’s excessive praise. I was someone who wandered because I didn’t know where to go. Unlike you who knows yourself, I didn’t even know who I was, Elias.”

 

I felt strength enter my spine at those words. I quietly raised my head. Luca let his gaze wander in midair as he let his voice flow into the wind.

 

“You called me a machine, didn’t you? It’s true. Maybe I am. I had nothing I liked and nothing I disliked. That’s my temperament. The trivial elements that form a person’s identity scatter before they have time to accumulate in me. My childhood was no different from emotionlessness given form through time. I had never loved stories, and people are made up of their individual stories.”

 

That sounded exactly like saying he had never loved people. Luca continued while holding the light of the water’s surface in his eyes.

 

“To be precise, after spending such a long time that way, I couldn’t even tell what I loved. You don’t know how foolish it is to only realize what something was after letting everything go. That’s when I met you.”

 

“…”

 

“For me, who had nothing I liked or disliked, everything in the world held no meaning and just passed by. I had nothing I truly wanted and no heart to truly strive for anything. Given this situation, fitting in with peer groups was hopeless, and while goodwill and hostility always clung to me, I had no particular thoughts about it since I liked and disliked nothing. I was lucky enough to seemingly get through my school years without any difficulty in others’ eyes, but nothing remained for me. I was just tired.”

 

Peer groups, school years… Lucky. I felt my head go blank. But more than anything, the words that caught my ears were these words that had been repeated since earlier.

 

“You say you have nothing you like or dislike.”

 

“Would it be easier if I gave an example?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Even if someone stabbed a knife into my stomach, I wouldn’t hate that person. The momentary irritation, pain, and rebellious feelings I experience aren’t genuine, so they don’t last long before crumbling. That’s what it meant to have nothing I liked or disliked.”

 

“Are you talking about Robert Mueller?”

 

Luca shook his head. Since no words followed, I swallowed and asked once more.

 

“What’s the reason you don’t hate them?”

 

“I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t love existence enough to allow that much interest.”

 

An answer containing no regret came immediately. Even while talking about himself, he used a tone that seemed indifferent, making it sound like he was talking about someone else. At the same time, I could feel countless hours of contemplation in that immediate response. Since I couldn’t understand those words, I asked again.

 

“Yourself, or that person?”

 

Luca shrugged. Negative emotions are also interest. Yes, I understand. I knew well what those words meant. However, a disorienting emptiness was dissolved in Luca’s words. I thought he had ironically loved too many things. Since I had no intention of imposing my ignorant judgment on Luca, I didn’t open my mouth.

 

“Elias. From the time I have memories, becoming someone else took priority over becoming myself. Since I couldn’t know who I was as a person other than reproducing fictional characters, since even I felt like a colorless, odorless, empty human being, becoming a character from stories written by others became the only choice left to me. At least then, even if I was nothing, fragmentary stories created by others’ hands would briefly become mine.”

 

This wasn’t the story of Luca I knew. Luca chuckled self-deprecatingly.

 

“You don’t know how empty a person who can’t stand alone is…”

 

That’s not true. I wanted to refute it, but it wasn’t the time and I didn’t have the right. I also knew he was telling his own story.

 

“You don’t know how ridiculous I am, having a profession that should contain life yet unable to create even my own story. I didn’t know how to do that. My entire life was a series of being swayed. I certainly hadn’t lived long, so I knew how much time and possibility stretched before me, and as time passed, I saw how easily the judgments my past self had made crumbled like powder, so I also knew there was nothing in the world I could be certain of. With each passing day, I understood people I hadn’t understood before and felt that what I had previously thought was a certain way was no longer that way, and each time I felt myself growing more distant from my past self. So, this time of anguish is merely childhood troubles that will later feel like a passing dream, and I knew that future could certainly exist for me too. But I didn’t feel the need to go that far.”

 

“Why?”

 

At that question, Luca quietly tilted his head with no expression. Then he spoke with a face still containing no meaning.

 

“I was tired.”

 

Luca didn’t speak about that point anymore. Only the sound of water stirred by wind could be heard. Soon Luca began to smile lightly, as if something was amusing.

 

“As I said earlier, that’s when I met you. You won’t ask me anything this time either, just like you did in the Catacombs. It would be nice if I could show you my time even by tearing away memories. My labyrinth would surely reflect that time.”

 

“…”

 

“I owe you much time, and I’m still in debt to you. Thank you.”

 

I cannot fully understand his words. Luca hasn’t told me everything yet, and no matter how I try to exercise my imagination from his words, it doesn’t come easily. Since every human has their own world, his world and mine are different. However, I know that he had been suffering for some reason, and even though he could now speak of it with a very calm face as if it were nothing, having thought about it long enough to do so, this wasn’t a story to be casually shared anywhere. That was important to me now. I truly felt the heart with which he thought of me, and I felt bad hearing his emotions from his words. And, at the same time, though I didn’t know if it would be good for that to happen…

 

I felt something welling up from within.

 

“Luca.”

 

“Yes, tell me.”

 

“You know what? This is the first time I’ve heard your story.”

 

“Hmm, I always tell you…”

 

“No, Luca. Not about your brother and your family, not survival, not incidents, not Pleroma.”

 

Luca’s pink eyes slowly turned toward me. Or perhaps my vision was flowing slowly. I tried to press down the joy I felt for the first time today in my chest, then spoke it aloud so it would reach his ears.

 

“Your story, I mean. You told me your story for the first time.”

 

* * *

 

I see the light circling in Elias’s eyes. It shone much more intensely than I had ever imagined, was perfectly confident, was as fiercely sharp as all the wounds he had suffered in his lifetime, and was as soft as if it would embrace everything, revealing the understanding that came from maturing early.

 

Ding—!

 

Congratulations!

 

‘Proposal 2: Elias Hohenzollern favorability +1 within deadline (1/1)’ Success! ‘Route 1 ― 【 +5 point 】’ confirmed.

 

I didn’t intend to say this.

 

I had no intention of gaining points with this… I unexpectedly won Elias’s heart.

 

“Actually, Luca. As you know, not all friends share intimate stories. Most of it is just ‘want to go to the pub in front of school for beer after today’s over,’ that sort of thing.”

 

“A high school student saying such things…”

 

“Right, then ‘want to do homework together after today’s over,’ ‘want to come to our family’s summer manor during vacation,’ ‘student council work is like this and that,’ ‘a friend is annoying me,’ ‘I accidentally broke the dormitory stairs and should I get ahead of it and replace the boards,’ etc. etc… Actually, even among friends, there isn’t much time to share the stories inside oneself, and most of the time we don’t feel the necessity to do so. That’s why we call friends with whom we share even intimate stories our closest friends, right?”

 

There were some quite specific stories in the middle, but I nodded for now.

 

“That’s right.”

 

“Since we’ve crossed life and death together, we don’t exactly have the emotions shared in typical friendships. That’s certain. You, Leo, and Narke have become especially precious friends to me, and I think you feel similarly. You all are friends who are like part of my life to me.”

 

“Yes, I feel the same.”

 

“The emotions we share are products of transformation caused by external pressure. The world made us more tightly bound and we made ourselves this way. But you know, even so, camaraderie doesn’t always make one open their mouth about the most vulnerable memories inside themselves.”

 

That alone isn’t the necessary condition for listening to another’s life. More is needed before bringing out what’s inside oneself. Elias was telling that story.

 

“Just because we watch each other’s backs doesn’t mean we can say we share hearts. I was waiting for today. The day I’d hear the sound in your heart.”

 

Elias smiled as he said this and pointed to his own ear. Yes, this beginning was what was needed. We were already friends like life itself, and now we were trying to go beyond that once more. I smiled following him and said.

 

“You know today is just the beginning, right?”

 

“Ah, you have more to tell me?”

 

I nodded. But it wasn’t something to talk about now. Even if we were to talk, we couldn’t keep having serious conversations after coming to a place to play, and Elias would also find it hard to stay in the water much longer, so it would be better to talk before sleeping or tomorrow.

 

“Then Luca.”

 

“Yes?”

 

“Let’s go in once more!”

 

“…”

 

Elias pointed at the water. Who’s having a hard time? Did I just think Elias would have a hard time staying in the water? I said through gritted teeth with a smiling face.

 

“The gown is drying. No.”

 

“Just take off the gown and go in!”

 

“That’s quite an obvious thing to say. No. I’m not playing anymore.”

 

“Ahhhhh~”

 

Elias grabbed onto my knee and hung there. The pressure gradually increased, so I tried to kick him away with my leg. Yes, I tried to do that.

 

“…!”

 

Some plant grabbed my shoulder and pulled me down. I hurriedly planted my elbow on the ground before my head could hit the tile behind me. I spread my mana to absorb the impact, but even so, I felt no shock transmitted to me.

 

‘Huh.’

 

Now that I looked, the floor was completely covered with grass pulled from the surroundings. I reflexively turned around. Leo, dressed from head to toe in attire completely unsuitable for a bathhouse, was leaning against the middle gate. After standing still for a while, he smiled and said.

 

“Looks like you had fun playing.”

 

“….”

 

From where I was sitting, I couldn’t see him, but from Elias’s position, he would have been visible. When I glanced at Elias to ask how long he’d been there, Elias just shrugged his shoulders. Then he pointed accusingly at Leo.

 

“What kind of manners is that? Aren’t you going to change clothes?”

 

“What do you mean.”

 

“Where do you rudely enter a place where people are relaxing fully clothed?”

 

I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but since I agreed with Elias for now, I didn’t stop him.

 

“My arm hasn’t healed yet, so I can’t get in the water. I’d like to get in too, though.”

 

“Then get out. Who enters hot springs wearing a jacket?”

 

“Then what about Lucas.”

 

Leo gestured toward me as he spoke. Are you comparing me to yourself now? I patted my clothes and said.

 

“At least show the courtesy of changing into a shower gown.”

 

“Same difference….”

 

Leo crossed his arms and snorted, then asked quietly.

 

“Why did you take off the artifact?”

 

“I was playing with Elias.”

 

At my answer, even Elias tilted his head and joined in.

 

“Why~? Can’t I take it off?”

 

“Unlike the piercings you wear around, it’s not just an accessory but an item for function. Playing is fine, but dangerous situations could arise, so wouldn’t it be better to leave the artifact as is?”

 

It certainly was for function. It had the nice function of core-smashing. I thought this moment when I had one artifact off and was only taking half damage might be an opportunity to hit Leo’s core, but I decided not to attack a friend recklessly for now. When Elias stuck out his lips and scowled, Leo shrugged as if to say ‘what do you want me to do?’

 

“Come out now. I have something to tell Lucas.”

 

“Why?! I don’t want to. I’m going to play with Luca for 100 more hours.”

 

“I’m sure you would.”

 

Leo continued with an expression that showed he hadn’t expected anything different. Then he smiled warmly and gestured with his hand.

 

“Count Ernst.”

 

“….”

 

In this situation? I was so dumbfounded that all sorts of thoughts whirled through my mind and I let out a hollow laugh. What Elias had said in the infirmary flashed through my mind.

 

‘So now really is the time to smash his core.’

 

He wouldn’t have called me without any business, so what he says from now on will determine the future of his core. I smiled politely and stood up from my seat.

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