How to Survive as the Second Son of a Mage Family - Chapter 98

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

How to Survive as the Second Son of a Magic Family (98)

“….”

Golden mana flowed from his fingertips.

With this, I could consider joining hands with Marian Baum a success.

I erased the smile that was about to form naturally and brought out the acting skills he had evaluated as good for backstabbing in one-on-one situations.

Marian Baum, who confirmed my expression, smiled and waved her hand.

“Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

“….”

“You’re not going to try to deny being a mage at this point, are you.”

I shook my head.

How could I make excuses now that blood had flowed? More importantly, there was no reason to.

“No, that’s… I was just a little surprised.”

“It’s not common to see magic used with an old human body. Didn’t you have any mages around you?”

“…There are some. But I didn’t expect to meet another person like that.”

Marian Baum nodded as if she understood.

“Of course. We’re all isolated.”

Marian Baum suddenly stood up from her seat and poured the remaining water from the bucket over me once more.

Splash—

I muttered as I felt all my bones becoming cold.

“It would be nice if you could give me a heads up.”

“Where else can we get water? If you walk around like this, you’ll get caught by the Secret Police.”

Marian Baum took off her coat and put it over my blood-stained clothes.

“Now, let’s have a serious conversation.”

* * *

“You said you have a friend who uses magic?”

“Yes.”

I answered while sitting in front of the fireplace.

Leo’s face is too well-known among the people to move around freely, and though it’s a bit dangerous, Elias and even Narke can move with me.

Just because Catacombs isn’t a Pleroma group doesn’t mean I can feel at ease.

This is exactly the kind of place where I could die if the fact that I’m a new human mage is discovered.

‘I haven’t felt at ease since the moment I got stabbed in the stomach anyway.’

Just because it’s Robert Mueller’s stronghold doesn’t mean I can catch him as soon as I enter.

To find clues, I need to go deep inside, so next time I infiltrate, I must have companions.

As I was staring at the fire, Marian Baum sat next to me at some point and stared at me intently.

“Which school did you say you attended?”

“I graduated from the gymnasium in Hanover.”

I answered while recalling the diploma and yearly records I had prepared in advance.

“Yes, I felt it from your way of speaking, so you’re indeed from Prussia.”

“Yes. I came here for work.”

“What did your parents do for a living?”

“They were involved in trade when they were alive.”

“Ah, I see. I asked something unnecessary.”

She probably knew when she asked.

She must have already investigated my background over the past few days.

She wouldn’t have revealed that she’s a mage without doing so.

As I silently stared at the fire, Marian spoke again.

“Mr. Granach. How much do you know about Catacombs?”

“I only know that it’s a group of commoner mages.”

At those words, Marian smirked.

“You know nothing.”

“….”

“It’s natural that you don’t know. If you knew something, it would mean everyone from the Nobility to the Emperor of this country knows it.”

Marian continued.

“As I said, Catacombs is a group of commoners. Recently, about 200,000 mages have joined.”

“I can’t imagine. Do they all stay there all day?”

“Some people live there entirely, but in cases like mine where we also have lives on the surface, we go in and out briefly.”

“How do you enter?”

This is the most important question.

Like Pleroma, the method of entering Catacombs isn’t known to the world either.

“Do you want to go to Catacombs?”

“Since there are people like me there. I want to go.”

“Once you enter, you’ll have to register your name there for life. Is that okay? It means you’ll have one more world tracking you, in addition to this surface world that’s already harsh to us.”

That’s a chilling statement.

But it’s something Elias also accepted in the story.

Either way, to stop Robert Mueller’s plan and make them my allies before the Emperor blows up Catacombs, I can accept this much.

“That’s fine.”

“Alright, good.”

Marian smirked.

“Come to think of it, I actually met someone like you yesterday. You’re similar in age, so you can become friends with that person when you go to Catacombs.”

“Yesterday? What a surprising coincidence.”

“Indeed. Some beggar was lying face down on the ground on this snowy day, so I wondered what was going on and turned him over, only to feel mana from his pulse.”

“…A beggar?”

“That’s right.”

“….”

It couldn’t be, could it?

Then Marian clapped her hands to snap me back to attention.

“Now, shall we go and take a look?”

* * *

We went outside and stood on the rooftop, holding our breath.

Snow was falling from the sky as it had been all along.

“What are you doing?”

Marian opened her pocket watch and was reflecting a small mirror attached to one side toward the sky.

Snow quickly accumulated on the mirror.

“We should go to Catacombs. Since the sun is rising, it should be quite a sight to see.”

Why is she reflecting the sky when we’re going to Catacombs?

She brushed off the snow that had accumulated on the mirror and said to me with a playful smile.

“Are you ready?”

When I nodded, Marian grabbed my wrist and tapped the mirror surface with her ring.

At that moment, I felt the world turning upside down.

“…!”

Light rushed in between my eyelids.

When my sense of balance returned and I carefully opened my eyes, I saw a scene I never expected.

“This is Catacombs.”

It was a space covered with glass on all sides.

Below, instead of ground, there were clouds, and the sun was rising in the distance.

Light reflected off the glass on all sides, sparkling softly.

I looked around at the pitch-black back and the front where the sun was now rising and said.

“…Wasn’t Catacombs supposed to be underground burial chambers?”

Even if it’s just a name, this is the sky, isn’t it?

With this much information, it could have appeared in the novel, but since Elias came here half-involuntarily, maybe he was too flustered to describe it properly.

“That reaction was intentional. When we first called ourselves the Catacombs.”

So even the name Catacombs was spread from here.

To make them search only the ‘underground’ like catching rats.

‘That’s a decent idea.’

I like it.

Then, Marian looked into the air and shouted loudly.

“What is right is wrong, and what is wrong is right!”

The scenery changed once again.

The fact that there were no clouds overhead remained unchanged, but now I was standing in a huge plaza.

‘It’s a system to filter out outsiders one more time.’

After that, I moved to this place’s Security Bureau together with Marian.

I don’t know whether it was modeled after somewhere, or if unlike Pleroma they uniquely built this world, but the scenery here was exactly the same as our world.

Except that beyond the glass wall installed in the distance, clouds were floating slightly below our eye level.

After drawing a vial of blood at the Security Bureau and coming out, Marian patted my shoulder.

“Now that you’ve even registered your identity, if you have nothing to do today, look around until six o’clock. The crackdowns on the surface have been getting severe lately, so it might become difficult to live there in the future.”

So he’s telling me to establish roots here too.

I could clearly feel his goodwill toward commoner mages.

‘…I need to finish what I came to do and leave as soon as possible.’

It left a bitter taste since I was taking advantage of his kindness, but I couldn’t not come.

Instead of answering, I asked a question while thinking of him from the novel.

“Teacher, do you often bring commoner mages to the Catacombs?”

“Yes. It’s part of daily life.”

“Isn’t it dangerous?”

“It is dangerous. The probability of being caught on the surface is high, and if I bring the wrong person, my position here becomes difficult too.”

When I looked at him silently, he continued on his own.

“In Prussia alone, five people died just last week. Did you know that?”

“…”

I couldn’t answer.

Marian Baum interpreted my silence on his own and continued.

“Yes, it’s understandable that you wouldn’t know. We’re beings so insignificant that our deaths can’t even become news stories.”

Right, these kinds of stories don’t appear in newspapers.

If only to exclude any possible sympathy votes, such facts shouldn’t be publicized.

Especially if the bourgeois commoner class focused the massacre’s target on ‘commoners’ rather than ‘commoner mages’, it could even create unintended backlash.

“The sun rises fairly for everyone, yet they believe there are people who should and shouldn’t be allowed under the sun. So how could I not bring you people here?”

“…”

“No matter how great the burden, someone has to show that we have the right to live. I’m also someone who survived that way, so it’s time to repay the kindness I received.”

“So you’ve made it possible to see the sun from a higher place.”

“Haha, I suppose so.”

He laughed lightly and continued.

“Of course there are other reasons too. The Catacombs must grow stronger.”

“Stronger.”

“His Majesty Friedrich must be afraid. He doesn’t know which generation of emperor will face the consequences of the persecution that began with his ancestors.”

Of course it comes back to him.

Since Elias brings him down with the Catacombs’ support.

“So it seems like he’s trying to wipe out the seeds as quickly as possible, but we can’t just quietly die. The Catacombs need every hand they can get right now.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Hehe, please do so when the time comes. Though I hope such a time never arrives.”

I quietly smiled in place of an answer.

Then, Marian suddenly stopped.

“Ah, I was just thinking of introducing you and there he is.”

“Yes?”

Marian looked into the distance and waved his hand.

“Karl!”

In the distance, there was a student looking around here and there with a wolf-sized dog.

Upon spotting us, the student shouted loudly enough that his ears might fall off and came running.

“Teacher!”

“…!”

It was a human I knew well.

Black-haired Elias looked at me with a grin that seemed to split his face, then shook his head.

“Wow, what’s this~ You really got beat up badly.”

“What are you saying to someone you’re meeting for the first time.”

Marian scolded him.

I was so dumbfounded that words wouldn’t come out.

I grabbed the back of my neck and closed my eyes.

“…Beg…”

The beggar I met yesterday was this guy?

I couldn’t hold back a hollow laugh.

“What? Beggar?”

“I haven’t said that yet.”

“Your name?”

“Dietrich Granach.”

“Hmm, good. Please call me Karl.”

“It’s not particularly a beggar-like name, how strange.”

“I told you I’m not a beggar~”

Elias grinned and put his arm around my shoulder.

I looked at Elias with eyes asking what he was doing in front of another person, but Marian didn’t mind at all.

“I can see this friend is quite sociable. I need to go meet my family, so I’ll be going now. Call me anytime if you want to go back.”

“Yes! Go quickly!”

Marian Baum seemed to have already figured out how to deal with Elias, so he just ignored his words and disappeared.

To accept this as merely being sociable, that person is quite something too.

Taking advantage of the arm around my shoulder, I pressed down on his head firmly with my right hand.

“Hey, you bastard…”

“Oh, I think this is the first time you’ve cursed at me~ How refreshing.”

“Are you kidding? When did you come here.”

“Yesterday. I couldn’t just leave you here alone.”

What’s with the pretense of consideration.

He probably figured out who the Catacombs personnel were and wanted to enter even a day earlier, so he came up with a clever plan to get into Marian Baum’s good graces.

That would have been the beggar act.

“How deflating. I thought my nose was going to break.”

“It wouldn’t have worked anyway, so no need to feel deflated. You look too much like a bookworm to pass as a beggar.”

When did you say you weren’t a beggar?

“Now, Dietrich. You must be flustered that this place looks more like where people live than you expected, but this isn’t the time to peacefully admire buildings.”

“Right, of course.”

Now that we’ve entered the Catacombs and Marian Baum has disappeared, we need to investigate.

Elias wandered around the city center, then naturally led me to a tavern.

“Two glasses of weisswurst and beer here~!”

“Yes~”

“Did you come to eat?”

“I have my reasons.”

Elias said something to the owner, then sat in the most secluded spot hidden by the counter.

Even after casting the sound-blocking magic, he seemed anxious and lowered his voice.

“Your target is still Robert Mueller, right? To stop Uncle’s crazy actions, and to get back at the person who tried to put a hole in your stomach, you absolutely have to find him first.”

“Yeah, that’s why I came all the way here.”

“So, I went to the radical anti-Pleroma groups in this area yesterday. If someone’s radical enough to try killing Nicolaus just to take down one Pleroma member, they must be an extreme radical.”

“Mm.”

This is good.

I nodded for him to continue.

“But… they seemed to know nothing about the Antagonist. There were three groups, so I checked them all, but they were all the same. If anything, they acted like they’d kill Robert Mueller if they met him.”

“Really?”

“Those people would give up their lives immediately if Nicolaus told them to. They were really scary.”

So the Antagonist isn’t from an anti-Pleroma group.

Still, I can’t give up.

Of course, there are still many possibilities before reaching that conclusion…

But seeing Elias speak so definitively, it seems difficult to learn anything more from that side.

“Then we know which direction to investigate now.”

“What is it?”

Elias crossed his arms and asked with a smile.

He seemed to want to hear what I would say.

“Let’s approach the Pleroma in the Catacombs.”

The Pleroma leadership might be different, but the rank-and-file Pleroma wouldn’t have strong objections to the assassination attempt on Nicolaus.

Unlike the leadership, the rank-and-file don’t need to think several moves ahead.

To them, Robert Mueller would be nothing short of a hero, so there’s a possibility they’ve collected more information about Mueller.

At those words, Elias pulled up the corners of his mouth with a satisfied expression.

“As expected, I knew you’d think that way. I think I’m starting to understand how your mind works now~”

As I looked at him quietly, Elias flipped over a receipt that had been lying on one side of the table.

The same phrase was written repeatedly like a pattern.

[In the beginning was the Word.]

A verse from the New Testament, the Gospel of John.

At the same time…

It’s also a verse that appears in Faust.

I burst into laughter.

“You did well to find even something like this.”

“People here use way too many codes~ Of course, we’re grateful for that.”

“Is this the meeting place?”

“No, we have to move again, but that’s fine since we can go there if we just have blood.”

Elias flipped the receipt while quietly muttering.

“Let’s wait. Until they come.”

I nodded and picked up the beer mug in front of me.

Just then, several people wearing black robes entered the tavern.

They presented a small certificate to the shop owner and said.

“We’re from the Catacombs Vigilante Group.”

While I was looking in their direction without much thought, I saw a familiar face.

“…!”

Someone from the Department of Magic who had played poker with me at the festival was here.

Elias’s face also hardened after seeing my expression change and checking in that direction.

‘…You can’t enter the Imperial 2nd Education Institute unless you’re nobility, but vigilante group?’

They glanced around the establishment and said to the shop owner.

“We received a report that there are new humans here. May we take a look around for a moment?”

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