How to Survive as the Second Son of a Mage Family - Chapter 483

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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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Elias couldn’t believe the reality of what he had accomplished. The boat swayed, and the blue magic spear that had sprouted from his hand was firmly gripped as the sky turned to foam and melted away. The divine power had just moved according to Elias’s will. He couldn’t understand why his magic had pierced through the old man’s fortress-like divine atmosphere, why such hostile atmosphere had been drawn to him, and he couldn’t believe the fact that he had managed to attack the old man whose location he didn’t even know.

‘How.’

At that moment, Elias noticed that the concentration magic the old man had cast on him had been broken, though he still couldn’t understand anything yet. Where is the old man? Where is my friend? Elias quickly turned his head. In the direction of his right arm, the old man stood defending himself. A massive shield made of divine power shattered and scattered before him. The old man didn’t fall, proving he was the master of a clergy family that ruled Rome. He pays respect to his reflexes. As Elias’s eyes sharpened, the old man, who had been wearing a pitiful expression, opened his mouth.

“What a truly foolish person you are.”

Foolish, me? For trying not to betray my friend’s trust? Elias twisted the corner of his mouth while blocking diagonally ahead with his staff in a guarded stance. He could feel the flow of spatial magic. Fortunately, the spatial magic had weakened. It was too early to say it was broken, but the great shock had created a gap with the original coordinate system. Unfortunately, this old man must have noticed it too. Elias answered the old man’s words without concern.

“I know.”

Narke, would Narke know the situation by now? Would he know this even without seeing? Elias tapped his ear to convey the situation to Narke. The old man points accusingly.

“Now you too must have realized how dangerous that person is.”

“Did Terminus Yukairya tell you that?”

“You must have realized that you know nothing about that person.”

“That’s right. I’ll honestly admit it. I still don’t know.”

Elias answers, feeling his heart grow cold. And he thinks. Without a doubt, I just learned for the first time about the existence of someone my friend has buried deep in his heart, and I was shocked. We never agreed to tell each other everything, and I haven’t told my friend everything about myself either, yet I thought the only thing I didn’t know about him was the operational plans he deployed. Even though he told me there were things he couldn’t tell me right now, I arrogantly believed I knew that person completely. To that extent, I had felt a kind of fulfillment and comfort regarding that friend, and a sense of superiority about his other human relationships. Like this, for instance. I know him better than the school friends who rejected him. I know him better than the people at headquarters. We have a connection from very deep places… Like my childhood friends, perhaps even the trivial aspects they couldn’t fill.

But now I know that’s all there was. I don’t know my friend. There are mountains of things I don’t know, and only a faint suspicion sits in one corner of my heart that he seems to have lived a life completely unrelated to mine. Of course, I didn’t know enough to reason through it, so I could only feel that way. And of course again, even if I comfort myself like this, it’s a clear fact that I know nothing about that friend’s intimate memories. That’s probably why my heart ached.

Then, so what?

What has changed?

“Right now you’re thinking this.” As Elias looked at his opponent with a smile, the old man spoke with blazing eyes. “Nevertheless, I cannot betray my friend.”

“Exactly.”

Before the words even finished, a harsh rebuke fell.

“What a childish thought this is! To be swayed by personal feelings and protect an existence that will bring unavoidable disaster to this world simply because you’ve been close friends! Young man, you’re thinking something terribly wrong right now. From your position now, I may be nothing but a villain making you the protagonist of a tragedy, but someday as you’re dying, you’ll remember my words. ‘I was wrong back then’!”

Elias stared at the old man with cold eyes. He had been amazed by the old man’s abilities throughout. He couldn’t help but admire the magical scholarly knowledge the old man had accumulated over more than a century, his own magical formulas, and the excellent abilities that seemed to be his unique powers. However, Elias condemned the old man’s mentality with truly pitiful anger. The old man had lived as a righteous person for a century, commanded Rome’s great families with his fingertips, and had more than a century’s worth of etiquette, principles, and the logic that drives the universe organized without gaps in the bookshelf of his mind. He possessed the righteousness of not wanting to harm innocent people in the slightest, while simultaneously being convinced that he had the right to treat beings he deemed guilty as non-human and destroy them, and there wasn’t an inch of flexibility to be found in that decision.

“Young man, the reason you can protect your friend out of loyalty is because you’re filled with ignorance, having no way to fully grasp this person’s world. How could you fully understand a world that long ago departed from human cognition and perception? You’ve only grasped a rough outline without even approaching the truth! You’ve only helplessly been hit by snow in a raging blizzard, you’ve only left your corneas to do their work, not knowing how much the randomness attached to the blades of those hundreds of millions of snow crystals resembles God’s. With such brief learning and insight, you cannot understand the world of chaos that will become the foundation of eternity. The stubbornness you believe to be righteousness is precisely the product of ignorance, and humans are bound to regret hasty judgments based on ignorance and emotion.”

Then Elias could only smile with a self-abandoning heart. Elias laughed casually while gripping his staff tightly.

“I agree. I still don’t know. Then why did you show me this scene?”

“Because a sensible human wouldn’t try to face a blizzard with their bare body.”

The old man waves his staff threateningly. Since it was merely a hand gesture he couldn’t suppress his own emotions with, no magic emerged from it.

“Because a sensible human would take shelter upon seeing the storm clouds bringing a snowstorm!”

Elias quietly stared at the old man before changing his tone.

“You know well, elder.”

The moment the old man’s brow became motionless, Elias spread the hand that had been gripping his staff and swept through the air as he spoke.

“I will remain in that place even when the storm strikes, and I will hold my position until the eye of the storm pierces through me. By then the spiral wings will have already turned many things to ruins, but I will say I will do so until the end.”

He’s saying he’ll do so knowing this. Elias recalls the baptism of knowledge that had penetrated his body. He recalls the repository of knowledge as vast as the universe. And he recalls his friend’s magic. His friend’s world, which would instantly index an ocean of information using each given word as a heading, briefly flashes through his mind. The fire of the Old Testament, the fire of the New Testament, the fire of Prometheus, the fire of Homer, the fire of Shakespeare… And the fires of unknown scholars and writers. The information he had truly read from him was scattering because he lacked the ability to store it. However, since Elias himself had no shortage of views on the subject, he argues like this. Or presents.

“I don’t know humans who flee from fire.”

Elias didn’t know how far the old man would grasp his wordplay. However, the fact that the old man didn’t know what meanings fire simultaneously contained couldn’t be a reason to stop speaking.

“Even if the human habit of stubbornly grasping fire is the driving force that leads to the world’s despair, isn’t it also simultaneously the driving force that leads to hope?”

It’s humans who grasp fire and build towers toward heaven with the corpses of all things, and it’s also humans, children of fire, who tend to those tower corpses, burn incense, and offer prayers. It’s humans who are animals that have decided to become gods after endlessly racing toward ideals, and yet it’s also humans who are animals that keep humans human despite all this. If divine fire is humanity’s portion, then the lamp is humanity’s invention. Fire’s ashes remain as organs that have fallen from my body and as expanded brain capacity. They remain as the lives of fellow Esper citizens who would be alive forming society now if they hadn’t been discarded for failing to meet standards. They remain as scarlet letters imposed on humanity that couldn’t obtain wealth and power. So just because I was born with this body under wrongly used fire doesn’t mean I had reason to agree with fire’s misuse and serve the world that made me. The old man’s anger didn’t arise because he read the apocalypse. It’s a matter of fundamental values. Just as humans who would abandon human ethics to dream of advancement if only given power don’t accept humanity’s lower class as human, it would be quite natural not to accept ‘the ideal of Espers’ as human, but I will never agree with the idea that humans must be treated as non-human no matter what happens. Fire refines me. Elias thought so. He had the same thought even after the confusion lifted by one layer.

“Therefore, even if I die because of my loyalty, I have no intention of avoiding this person’s path.”

“Not just you, but the world will be destro—”

“Even if it’s destroyed, I have no intention of avoiding it.”

Elias cuts off the old man’s words sharply and speaks.

“In my view, the apocalypse is made by people like you. You predetermine human capabilities and hastily conclude that those above and below that range are not human. That’s why some call an innocent person ‘one who can build the Tower of Babel’ while others call him the Messiah.”

“Messiah, ah, how arrogant! That person couldn’t have said such things directly, but seeing that you know this, you must have already obtained the overflowing information from within him.”

The old man speaks excitedly. As if the fact that some group tries to use him as a kind of messiah serves as justification for why he must be killed. From his tone, it doesn’t seem like the old man knew this fact beforehand. Elias looks at the old man with cold eyes, pretending not to have heard. Then he continues speaking.

“The concept of human range is making this person be killed, which is unfortunate. Regrettably, I’m someone who doesn’t believe in human range.”

“Ah, why does such an innocent soul keep its eyes tightly shut like this? What a lamentable situation! Didn’t you see it directly? That flood of countless knowledge! Isn’t that the true Library of Babel!”

“Of course I saw it directly.”

Elias drew hope before his eyes. He wished for blue light to surge from the magic staff he held. He wished not to fall again to the old man’s magic and wished for the old man’s hands not to reach his fallen friend behind him. He wished to buy time until support arrived.

Kwaang—…

With an explosive sound pushing away the air, flames resembling his friend’s covered his hand and staff and shot toward the sky. Elias behind it reflected light with irises of the same color and shouted.

“I saw directly that this person is a human no different from me.”

In the center of tears, I couldn’t obtain evidence that he wasn’t human. Spear-like magic was aimed at the old man’s neck.

“That’s all. My respect goes this far.”

I don’t even want to know how the old man is connected with Terminus Yukairya. I’m not curious where he hid his correspondence with the State Council either. I don’t know if I can protect my friend against such a cunning human. Only that fact frightened Elias. Elias suppressed the cold rising to his chin and spoke.

“If you have no intention of letting us go, then fight me!”

The old man looks at Elias with a face of lamentation, a face experiencing wounds that seem ready to tear. He who boarded the ark now has the face of someone watching a newborn child being swept away in a flood. Elias thought so. The old man lowered his head and stamped his foot hard.

Immediately after, Elias doubted his own eyes. The old man had disappeared from that spot. He wasn’t visible anywhere he looked. He couldn’t feel any creature’s movement either. That he really stepped aside—that couldn’t be. Since the old man was the family head, he would know each spatial magic warp coordinate system, so he either warped outside this space or was using some other shallow trick. Damn it, this cursed old man has avoided a frontal battle now. Even if he really stepped aside, with a lifetime’s worth of doubt and distrust, it couldn’t be trusted. However.

Now wasn’t the time to express distrust through action even if he distrusted. Elias quickly withdrew his magic and slapped his friend’s cheek. His hands and feet were still trembling slightly, but there was no sign of him waking up. Ah, if only I could use divine power. If only I could… Elias felt all the blood in his body growing cold as he sent magic into his friend’s blood vessels. No matter how strongly he sent it, nothing changed. Even after shaking his core several times, his mind remained firmly trapped in a state of concentration on thought.

He couldn’t stay like this forever. Elias carried his friend on his back and stood up, running toward the open door. He had to go to the main building of the archives covered by a pitch-black curtain. This huge round room was now sickening. The moment Elias’s magic touched the door.

Kwaaaaang—!

An explosion shook the room. Elias felt his heart shake as he squinted his eyes. At the same time, he saw orange light shining in from his side. He faintly felt heat clinging to his calves. His senses amplified even without ‘concentration’. Damn it. Elias turns his head with a drumbeat pounding his eardrums. Flames shoot up to the ceiling. The archives were on fire. The door was far away as it usually is in dreams. His prediction was right. This cowardly old man thinks he’s right and everyone else is wrong to the end, so he left without even fighting. Elias knew that no matter how much he ran, the divine power’s hallucinogenic effect kept pushing him away from the door. No matter what he did, he couldn’t get closer. Perhaps it was that old mage’s spatial magic. Panic is poison. Elias knew better than anyone how to respond when someone tried to kill him, and he prided himself on being an expert. Even thinking that way, he would leave this place alive. Since he wasn’t alone, the weight of life hung on his shoulders. Elias soaked an elixir on his handkerchief and held his friend properly. Instead of carrying him on his back, he had to cover his nose and mouth. Now, let’s think step by step. The interior of this archive annex is wooden, but seeing the dome roof over the circular walls, there must be stone walls surrounding the outside. The building won’t collapse entirely—but carbon monoxide will kill us. Can we last about 2 minutes? Then we can try about five times. His vision was blurred by the smoke of bright red flames. Sweat began to flow from the heat. Elias flicked his hand from under the hand holding his friend. Again, a long lump of magic was caught. The fact that he couldn’t approach the door here implies two possibilities: either the old man had laid magic on the location beforehand, or the old man was still deploying magic from this close range. In other words, he was in the palm of the old man’s hand—in the middle of the magic he created, just like before. He had to trust that unknown power, that will, once more. Even as his senses were becoming blurred, he had to. Elias puts strength into his arms in the vision turned bright red with smoke and flames.

Another roar sounds.

A vibration that seemed to shake heaven and earth followed. It wasn’t time to miss a counterattack due to sensory confusion. Elias tried not to rub his eyes and, practically unable to use his sight due to the smoke, floated a blue spear in the air. Tears flowed from the soot entering his nose. His lungs stung.

—And it came to pass after many days, that the word of the Lord came to Elijah in the third year, saying,

At the familiar voice that couldn’t possibly be heard, Elias instinctively knew he had lost his mind. Light reminiscent of sunset poured down from the sky. Strangely, he felt the air gradually clearing.

—Go, show yourself unto Ahab; and I will send rain upon the earth!

Divine power covered the space. Elias squinted his eyes, and when he opened them again with terrible pain brushing the inside of his eyelids, his mouth fell open. Half of the domed ceiling had been blown away. An unknown hand reached in. Elias raised his gaze up along the pure white glove tips. Pure white hair like a dove’s fluttered in the wind. Narke with blue eyes stood before him with the sunset at his back. He speaks.

“You changed today.”

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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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