How to Survive as the Second Son of a Mage Family - Chapter 563

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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 Noble Family (563)

Ulrike did not twist his wrist. It was too late. Changing direction now would be no different from severing his opponent’s limbs. [He has distributed freely, he has given to the poor; his righteousness endures forever; his horn will be lifted up in glory], the spell went through completely without miscalculation. The mana that had been taking on a blade-like color scattered back into green. His instinct dismantled the materialization magic cast on the wand. He blocked it. There was a sensation of something pushing his hand away. The leather gloves that separated his hand from the blood could not convey the texture of blood. They lacked that ability. What he felt was slight pressure, nothing more. The leather gloves included in his uniform were not much different from these firefighting gloves, so they felt familiar. These leather gloves that appropriately removed sensation were actually meant for rescue work, but today they became equipment that facilitated killing. He had never felt such relief at equipment’s sensory blocking. If it hadn’t been so…

“Get a grip.”

At the voice that pressed against his vocal cords, Ulrike shook his head. He could not close his eyes even once. His pink pupils also did not look down at the pierced flesh. That remained fixed on the green eyes even as Ulrike’s gaze swept across strongholds in a controlled manner following the combat mage instincts he had internalized, sending various commands to his brain and spinal cord.

Ulrike’s mind was clearer than ever. Unlike Lucas’s expectations, he was not just blaming himself. Normally he would have frozen in shock. With his friend’s life hanging in the balance, he could not afford that. The last remaining thread made Ulrike into a person who had nothing but combat. You can’t properly protect anything. Was there any meaning to living in luxury at the manor? Lost anger cried out faintly beneath his locked consciousness. Ulrike knew. According to everything he had learned at home and school his entire life, he should have expressed this anger—which was a kind of opportunity—outwardly, through his sword, in the most controlled manner. Every oath said: the fault was not with ‘us’ but with the outside. Us—me, Kleist, Junker, Imperial Court. The blood in his head flowed down and showed no intention of rising back up. That was actually right for now. It was the enemy who created this situation. So panicking to blame himself now would only interfere with their plan, as Lucas had said.

It didn’t seem like he had pierced a lung, but when he tilted his body, a gasping sound was heard. Ulrike slowly laid his friend on the ground with bloodshot eyes and turned his head. Even hearing the water sounds that shouldn’t be heard, his heart didn’t race or his breathing quicken. In the face of an excessively severe crisis, the body simply acquired mechanical efficiency as if telling him to resolve the situation quickly.

As the darkness lifted, a forest appeared. The sound of wind and bird chirping from not far away kept making this place seem unreal. Wrong. This is reality. The place you so wanted to accept as reality is false, and this place you want to believe is false is truly reality. The beautiful lie you believed was shattered by a few conversations that made you terribly uncomfortable, but the reality you don’t want to believe shows no intention of breaking even in the face of life’s worst horror. Ulrike threw off his outer garments and tore his relatively cleanest shirt into long strips.

“…!”

When Ulrike pressed hard on the area where the sword had entered, Lucas contorted his face. He screamed silently while bending his body. Ulrike watched this expressionlessly. Normally, seeing his friend’s pain with his own eyes, he would have been at a loss, standing up and sitting down, holding his head, pulling his cheeks… he would have caused a complete commotion, and Ulrike himself knew this. Such expectations seemed like a dream. The pressure on the wound did not ease at all. He was focusing on everything in his field of vision. Even the rats scurrying by touched Ulrike’s tense nerves.

They said anger should be expressed in the most controlled manner. He learned today that this control was not the noble swordsmanship of refined swordsmen that was like playing at being immortals, but murder—though he might have known yesterday too. So he had swung his sword waiting for the day to kill people, knowing while not knowing and not knowing while knowing, and growing up like this to become like the adults he had been unable to understand for some time. Everything was disgusting. Abhorrent. The mindset, tactics, and swordsmanship he had learned, maintained so elegantly before leather gloves that conveyed no sensation of life ending—from the moment he became aware of this, all his knowledge turned to disillusionment.

“…It’s okay. No, it’s not okay, but you know what I mean, right? I’m not someone who says empty words to comfort people.”

“Don’t talk.”

No matter how much the gloves conveyed nothing, they could not block the brain’s chemical reactions. Not human conscience. He could hear blood dripping to the floor, and now the gloves seemed to be slowly getting warm. The torn shirt quickly turned bright red. The smell of blood. He didn’t think wild beasts might come running… Ulrike could kill everything.

“Calm down.”

A strained voice mixed with the wind.

“It’s not your fault. It’s amazing that you came to your senses. You could do that because you’re 101. While I’m at it, I have to say I don’t feel any affection for the name Eschete, so I’d rather…”

Lucas said all sorts of things to reassure Ulrike. This seemed more like evidence that he was losing his mind.

Because he was supposed to kill ‘people who could be killed,’ nothing had been a problem until now. So he was supposed to kill Pleroma, monsters full of greed who put others in predicaments, but strangely, from the day he was assigned his first large-scale operation after entering the Imperial Court, he wondered if he had the authority to kill those monsters.

“…The good thing about Espers’ bodies is that they’re made not to die easily even when killed.”

But he ignored the signals and diligently killed. He destroyed and severed with all his might. This was considered more noble than drawing revolvers and daggers under the pretext of dueling when angry after fighting in taverns, and it was something celebrated by everyone. That was righteous murder. Magic makes the homeland prosperous. Murder becomes the victor’s privilege within graduation photos of elites all wearing the same uniform and smiling the same smile, becoming noble. The characteristically strong facial bone structure of Europeans and bright sunlight cast dark shadows over every eye in the photo. What remained were white teeth visible between upturned lips.

“Of course they wouldn’t make natural energy sources that produce mana easy to kill… You could stab them dozens of times and they wouldn’t die. They wouldn’t have made you die humanely…”

So we became accustomed to murder.

We who? Probably everyone. One person’s habit led to killing a friend in the darkness today under the pretext of self-defense. No fool could fail to know this truth. Ulrike regarded the person approaching to wake him as an enemy. The magic he cast by placing hands on his head and shoulders successfully destroyed the pillar of the already cracking false world, returned him to reality, and put a hole in his friend’s stomach. Every time his stomach moved, blood burst in different directions.

Ulrike now well understands the behavioral principles of people who stay far away from him because he wears clothes that make him look like a combat mage. So this kind of mishap, the habit of killing people that is difficult at first but becomes routine later, the insane instinct that makes one try to harm others at the slightest loss of reason—they wouldn’t want to stay near those who spent their lives learning to kill and advanced through killing, lest something go wrong. Ulrike himself was like that now. Someone cried out from the edge of reason that he must distance himself from his habitual self for the sake of everything.

“Trust me. This isn’t the first time. Among all the things I’ve experienced, this has the best prognosis. Your mana is moving like it’s alive… It’s blocking the wounded area, see, the blood isn’t gushing anymore either. You can hold on. Now we need to get out of here, they must have discovered that your mental prison is broken. We don’t know where they’ll move us. We have reinforcements. Just wait a little…”

Lucas spoke slowly while looking straight up at the sky with his eyes wide open. Who was he talking to? Ulrike had never shown that he didn’t trust his words or was afraid. Was he afraid? This was madness rather than fear. Ulrike continued to stare wide-eyed without expression, with eyes so clear that the whites occupied about twice the proportion of his irises, doing what needed to be done. The clamor in his brain had no effect on his actions in reality. If he had become a machine that only knew how to kill enemy soldiers as ordered, now he had to do the work of protecting allies. The hemostasis time needed for non-mages was 10 to 15 minutes, and for mages 5 to 10 minutes—without even needing to reach 5 minutes, Lucas’s bleeding subsided in 3 minutes. This meant his mana was strong. But it also meant he had used up all available mana to stop the bleeding. Ulrike tied cloth to press against his stomach. When he placed his friend’s legs on a rock and stood up, Ulrike had turned white as paper. With his height like a decade-old spruce tree, swaying his long limbs that seemed ready to snap and blow away in the wind, he went toward where water sounds could be heard.

…So Lucas’s words not to blame himself were somewhat achieved. This was disillusionment rather than self-blame. And anger. Ulrike found the name for a sensation he was feeling for the first time in his life. He had called Lucas pessimistic, but now he had become that way too. The more he knew, the deeper he dug, the more it was just things that would make his shoulders droop with exhaustion…

He felt himself getting farther and farther away.

Day by day, more and more, farther away… Where was the courtyard? Now he was about to forget where home had been. Maybe it was okay to forget. If only he hadn’t known there was a road outside the house, if only he could have spent his life in that sunny front yard enjoying the sensation of his family’s glory and the hopeful future yet to come?

He didn’t have such thoughts. The bark of the tree he grabbed while staggering crumbled. Rather not know? He came this far because he didn’t know. He needed to know. He wanted to know. He took up the sword because he loved his family and the mage who made him. He continued training because he loved himself. He entered the Imperial Court because he loved his country. After all that, everything he had known was no longer important, and for the first time in a life where he could grasp everything he wanted, his gaze fell on what he had lost for the first time, and what he would lose second, or the humanity he might have already lost. What I loved and what loved me lifted me to this place and betrayed me, tearing my whole body apart. People who turn their bodies toward the days when they knew nothing with eyes closed, ears blocked, and mouths shut are people who have been shattered once. No one told him that knowing could be such a painful thing…

Everything he knew was different. Everything changed, leaving only him behind. Even if he was the one who changed, the fact that nothing remained was the same.

“Where is this place.”

He needed to find out where this was. Bushes had grown thick enough to make movement inconvenient. There was a thick tree with a circumference so large that even spreading his arms to embrace it, his hands wouldn’t reach the ends, and the surrounding trees were also thick as if they were hundreds of years old.

“This feels just like that stream we set up in Mimesis.”

He raised the corners of his mouth with bloodshot eyes. Anyone would think he looked insane. Ulrike himself thought so too. Maybe going insane would be better. Ulrike returned to Lucas without figuring out where this forest was. He moved his ashen lips like a corpse with lightless eyes.

“Why didn’t they move us straight to their house?”

The closer he got to where Lucas was, the more his sense of reality coldly awakened him. He couldn’t leave strategy entirely to Lucas. Think, if you don’t want to put anyone else in trouble, think with your own head. Hurry!

He staggered while muttering as if chanting spells within the sound-blocking magic.

“It must have been to separate me and take me away. One is already burdensome, but two even more so. Besides, they expected Narke to be there too. See, they drew a picture where they could blow their nose without using their hands. As for strategy…”

Opportunistic. Despicable. No hesitation in using every available resource. The reason was probably that they had much to lose if they acted recklessly, so they didn’t rate their chances highly. But think about it. Why did it have to be me? Why did ‘that’ have to happen only to me? What could they gain by leaving me in confusion? Lucas said he should have been like that too. So if both people weren’t in their right minds, both their minds would remain in beautiful illusions while their bodies weren’t there, and in situations where bodies remembered aggression, they could unknowingly kill each other…

Someone answered inside his head.

“They knew I would kill you if cornered.”

That was it. Ulrike’s head cleared completely. I am what I eat. I will eat you and become Yahweh. If it were Pleroma… If you devour me to make one person, they would take only that one person. The friend he met returning with a water container only had his eyes open. He answered with difficulty, whether he heard what Ulrike was saying.

—”That could never happen. Even if I die because of their schemes, I could never kill another person.”

When did I speak aloud? Ulrike couldn’t tell how much he had actually said and how much he had thought. He couldn’t remember who had spoken either. But he heard it.

—”So you mustn’t stop me. Please. Whatever I do, if my mind seems sane, definitely do that. If you have a plan I’ll follow it, but even so, if I ask twice, please listen to me.”

Ulrike silently looked at his friend and nodded. His vision was completely dizzy. At the end of his confused vision, something shining passed by. Hmm, Ulrike saw a stone shining in the dirt and dug into the ground as if entranced. It wasn’t very deep, so it didn’t take long to extract. What he grasped was a thin circular disc—it was a coin. With the profile of a Human with a beard on his chin in relief…

[UN CENTIME 1848]

One centime. Ulrike looked down at the copper-colored coin with dry eyes.

“It’s France.”

—”…What?”

“It was France. They dropped us in a French forest.”

Ulrike still spoke rapidly without expression. Sound-blocking magic had become almost habitual.

“They moved us considering that we would survive safely. It’s certain. They plan to claim that Pleroma violated the cross-border warp prohibition clause and set up a portal connecting the two, to frame someone else and expand the scale of the crime. This way they have nothing to lose. If things go according to their plan, they can easily kidnap us, and if our chances are good enough for us to survive, they can blame the very fact that we warped to France on Pleroma. Saying Pleroma set fires in buildings and threatened the security of not just Germany but France too… What do we care whether Pleroma actually did such things or not. France wouldn’t carelessly connect portals from the standpoint of protecting their own safety. This logic is invincible. It makes all false accusations possible.”

All sorts of calculations flowed through Ulrike’s mind. He realized how difficult it was to fully express his thoughts in words. His thoughts were faster than words, so he couldn’t capture them as vibrations. Ulrike muttered without blinking once.

“Their target is you. But instead of me, you became endangered. How do those bastards plan to move now?”

No one in his head answered. He spoke to himself with the sound of wind.

“They’re going to kill me.”

…Bang—

A hunting rifle shot is heard in the distance. Mana flows connecting his left leg and right hand. His body took combat stance first. Ulrike held his breath and turned his head toward where the gunshot came from.

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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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