Surviving the Assassin Academy as a Genius Professor - Chapter 110

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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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Chapter 110
EP26 – Betting Table, “Dungeons of Gyeonghap Castle↑” (4)

‘No. That can’t be right.’

Valmond considered the possibility that he’d simply misunderstood something. It was possible, he supposed.
He’d heard the word “genius” applied to them often enough. And by his own assessment, they were geniuses—no question about it.
But that designation only held weight within Hiaka, didn’t it?
Valmond understood how vast the world was, and he knew better than anyone just how formidable true masters could be. His mother had taught him that much.

‘They must be using a 0th Generation Server, not the 10th.’

Nowadays there was all this talk of human rights and such, but two centuries ago, children under nine were routinely thrown into dungeons. Nations competed over it, or so he’d heard.

‘That would explain it.’

Even if they were called the greatest geniuses of all time, if they were nine years old, he thought his group would win.

With that settled in his mind, Valmond ran harder.

Meanwhile, he pondered the structure of the dungeon. The Dungeons of Gyeonghap Castle↑ was divided into five distinct sections in total.
They’d just cleared the first section of the labyrinth.
Four sections remained.
Ordinarily, they should have been hopelessly lost by now.

“This way!”

Elise chose a path at a fork with uncanny precision.

‘What’s gotten into that idiot?’

By Valmond’s estimation, Elise was remarkably stupid. But whenever she showed certainty like this, there was always a reason behind it.

“Hey!”

So he called out as they raced onward through the rushing air.

“What?!”
“How are you finding the way?”
“I smell it!”
“You smell it?!”
“A weird kind of… emptiness!”
“You can smell that?!”

What on earth was an “empty” smell?
Valmond closed his eyes.
Then he sniffed carefully, trying to sense it.
Despite his keen nose, he detected nothing remotely unusual.

“There’s nothing to smell!”
“Your nose must be broken!”
“What are you talking about? I’ve got the nose of a wolf!”
“So do I! Get out of the way, you’re distracting me!”

Elise raised her fist, so he dodged out of range.
Damn. Such a ridiculous thing to argue about.
Elise was an idiot, true enough—too oblivious to notice how much he looked out for her, always acting so tough.
But he’d decided to be patient. He was, after all, the better person.

But no matter how he thought about it, the fact that Elise could smell something he couldn’t detect seemed odd—and so, even as her guidance remained ambiguous,

“There! Everyone, ready for combat!”
“Roger!”

Elise had pinpointed Section 2 with perfect accuracy once again.

“Ah, I’ve got it!”

Valmond shouted and drew out his Dark Starlight sniper rifle, the Siegfried⚉.

“Section 2 is infested with Bomb Spiders! When they die, their legs explode—don’t sever them! Don’t get close! Attack from maximum distance!”
“Got it!”
“Understood…!”

Spiders that restricted close-quarters combat.
But what were this team’s strengths? Stealth, combat prowess, and Illusion Magic, respectively.
Here, he needed to be the one to step up.
Even as he was thinking, a spider’s six legs erupted above Kendrick Drake’s head.

Boom—!!

“Kendrick Drake, you idiot!”
“Gah!”

Fortunately his head was intact, but his skin was scorched and charred in places, and where the flesh had burned away, blood wept freely.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
As Valmond fired several shots to detonate spiders at a distance, Elise and Grey were also struggling.

“Damn it, I severed a leg!”
“Fool…!”

Grey hastily wrapped the severed leg with the Silver Thread and hurled it far away.
After Elise sliced through a spider’s head, the legs thrown into the distance detonated.

Boom—!!

And so the battle dragged on sluggishly.
Valmond ground his teeth. This wasn’t as simple as he’d thought. It was different from the straightforward assassination training he’d done until now.
Assassins who belonged to warrior parties also made dungeon runs eighty percent of the time. And this was Valmond’s first dungeon experience.

“Argh…! There are too many of them…?!”
“They keep hopping up—they’re hard to pin down!”
“Damn!”

This was his domain—the space where marksmanship was the leading force.
Before someone suffered worse injury or the team bogged down further, he had to act.
The moment he resolved this with such intensity,

——.

Some strange sensation flickered across his mind.

‘Hm.’

This was his first time actually seeing a Bomb Spider. In truth, he hadn’t encountered many monsters in his life. Yet despite this, Valmond found himself beginning to read their movement patterns.
When a spider’s six legs were all engaged: movement invariably began with the front legs, then the rear legs followed, and finally the middle legs moved—a gait dictated by the need to maintain balance.
But in their locomotion lay an instinct to avoid each other’s paths. Come to think of it, that made sense. They were bombs, after all. Weren’t they mutually lethal to one another?
The individual pattern, and the pattern of the swarm—both became readable to him.
Once he grasped that sensation, the movements of every spider in that place began to reveal themselves. Each was distinct, yet their paths became visible.

Bang!

Fire a bullet, and he understood the principle of how they twisted their bodies to dodge.

Bang!

Once the principle clicked, he could force them to evade in whatever direction he chose.

‘Now!!’

Valmond erupted a Mana Trace from his physical form.

Crackle-!!

In exchange for vast expenditure of mana, the aim was to craft a level-8 ability bullet—one that ricocheted a full hundred times, provided the angle was precise.

『 Hundred Ricochet Bullet 』

In an instant, forty percent of his mana was drained.

Thwunk ――――

A bullet infused with the essence of Dark Starlight cut across the space. It grazed walls and ceiling, spider heads and legs and bodies with surgical precision, obliterating dozens of spiders in its path. Nearly thirty percent of those in the second sector fell.

“Back!!”

In the same breath Valmond roared,

Boom-!!

A tremendous explosion engulfed the maze’s edge. The spiders, herded into a single cluster by Valmond’s direction, detonated in unison. They ignited in succession, chain-reaction after chain-reaction, sweeping the maze clean for vast distances.
After the shockwave subsided, the three of them raised their thumbs high.

“Man! That was pretty slick just now…!”
“Yeah!”
“Whoa, how did you do that!? Ah, let’s move!”

A swell of pride filled Valmond’s chest.
And at the same time, a question.
What exactly did I just do?

As they ran onward,
Valmond mulled over what he had just unleashed.
His [eye], his [vision]—it seemed they had just ascended to a slightly higher realm in that single moment.
How had this happened?
Despite his long years of training as a marksman, his progress had always been slow…….
Then he reached a startling conclusion.

“……!!”

Ah!
Now that he thought about it, something was strange.

‘Has the Professor ever left us to our own devices like this before?’

Valmond recalled the events of the past.
Elise, beaten by Marina’s gang.
Grey, cast into the chaos of the Empire.
Kendrick Drake, dazed and senseless.
And himself…….

‘Never once. He’d never left us to fend for ourselves.’

This time was different. The Professor had pushed them into the dungeon without guidance. And thinking about it again, that was terribly strange.

‘This is the Dante Assassination Unit’s first true operation. Even in our daily lives, the Professor has always shown us countless paths forward. There’s no reason he wouldn’t do the same at such a crucial moment.’

Yet he hadn’t told them. Why……?

Understanding crashed over him.

“Hey! Everyone listen up!!”

Just before they entered the third section.
Valmond’s voice rang out suddenly.

“What!?”
“There’s a reason the Professor sent us here without telling us anything!”
“What!?”
“I don’t get it…!”

Valmond laid out briefly what had just occurred to him.
All three looked astounded.
If the Professor hadn’t shown them the path, then the reason was.
Because he couldn’t tell us.

“We have to find the answer ourselves!!”

This too was a form of teaching……!
And remarkably, Valmond’s words became reality.

“Hey! What are you doing stepping on that!?”
“A mistake…! A mistake…!”

In the third section, Grey triggered a trap and a massive stone began rolling toward her. She pulled the stone toward herself instead, and astonishingly, she had spontaneously mastered the 7th-level movement technique Wall-Running.
She succeeded in dropping the stone while running along the wall at the squared precipice that inexplicably opened in the center of the labyrinth.

“This iron gate can’t be broken. Like the other dungeons, we must solve the puzzle element here.”
“Grrrraaaaaagh―!”
“Hey, wait! What are you doing!!”

In the fourth section, Kendrick Drake drew forth the battle axe Santa Barbara, which had an inherent explosion spell. With it, explosions condensing at a single point and piercing deep, he began to grasp the upper-level formula Deep Penetration Formula on his own.

“A scent!”

Elise followed that familiar scent and kicked at a maze wall, which crumbled away.
It was only later that she realized: that passage was supposed to be reached only after defeating the boss.
Only then did Valmond understand. Elise had caught the scent of “mana hiding mana”—Dispel.
This was impossible. She had sensed the taste of the tasteless. She had smelled the scent of the scentless!

Thus they had grasped Professor Dante’s intentions with precision. In this first dungeon expedition—not an assassination—everyone was achieving a degree of advancement that was nothing short of remarkable.

Valmond marveled at this in his heart.

‘Professor Dante. Just who are you…!!’

It was as he suspected. That man had a plan for everything. Even if he failed to grasp it someday, it would only be because of his own ignorance.
And so, skipping even the boss fight, they cleared the fifth section, and finally an [Exit] began to appear beyond the darkness of the straight path ahead.

“Let’s go, let’s go, everyone! It’s over!”
“What? It ended faster than I thought…!”

Then a startling status window bloomed before Valmond’s eyes.

A Revelation. The status window that the Star uses to communicate!
Valmond, who reflexively was about to answer “Zamryong Academy,”
now uttered a name that resonated far more deeply.

‘Dante Assassination Unit.’

* * *

After sending the cadets into the Dungeons of Gyeonghap Castle↑, I came out for a quick meal with Ran. The schedule for the Empire was so tight that I’d only managed to feed the kids something like kimbap before sending them into the dungeon.
As we were eating simple sandwiches together, Ran spoke.

“They should be entering the third section by now, I’d think.”
“I hope so. Though I suspect they’re probably still floundering around the Bomb Spider.”

If you know the solution, the time cuts in half.
But going in blind, they’ll struggle.

“My mind isn’t at ease.”
“Why is that, sir?”
“Since it’s their first dungeon run, a good ranking would serve as motivation for them going forward, wouldn’t it?”
“Indeed. It’s a shame.”

What can you do? Not everything in this world goes as you wish. This time, I lost to Rebecca.
Still, I gained her favor, so that’s half a victory. And I succeeded in getting the kids into the dungeon, so that’s another half. Which means it’s practically my victory overall, isn’t it?
…was what I was muttering to myself about when—

Huh? What’s with this sudden status window…?
Indeed, I was given Star Fragments.

┃ Gift [Gyeonghap Castle↑]
┃ Reward: Star Fragment × 50

Fifty? It’s giving me fifty?
What on earth is happening?

“What’s the matter, sir?”
“……”

Ran asked a question, but I myself couldn’t understand what was suddenly happening, so I paused to think for a moment.

A few minutes later, the truth became clear.
Something had happened—something genuinely, unbelievably insane.

───
▶ Dungeons of Gyeonghap Castle↑ / 10th Generation Server / Ranking Board

1. [Private] Anonymous : 29m 19s 19 (▲999, new!!)

2. [Empire] Hebrew Mercenary Corps : 31m 16s 32 (▼1)
3. [Empire] Hella Party : 31m 21s 42 (▼1)
4. [Empire] Gulrabzamun Youth Knight Order : 32m 29s 22 (▼1)
5. [Croitz] Knight Assassination Unit : 33m 54s 59 (▼1)
⋮
───

The first-place ranking in the Dungeons of Gyeonghap Castle↑ had been broken for the first time in a hundred years. So the next morning, I couldn’t help but be shocked.

The entire world had been turned on its head.

EP26

Betting Table, Dungeons of Gyeonghap Castle↑

END

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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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