Surviving the Assassin Academy as a Genius Professor - Chapter 129

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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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Episode 129
[Incursion] One-Horned Demon Beast Bomiteka (2)

A commander’s emotion exerts overwhelming influence on every soldier beneath him. As commanders throughout the castle cried out with renewed courage, the soldiers who had been gripped by fear raised their voices in turn. “For Hiaka’s eternal glory!!” They shook off their dread and began to focus on their duties.

With Aymon’s commands falling precisely where needed, the momentum of the siege beasts began to falter.
Slowly, the defenders overcame the qualitative and tactical disadvantage, and the tide of battle began to shift in their favor.

‘…We can do this!’

Though the battle had only just begun, one commander felt courage welling up within him.
Until now, the Outer Castle Gate bore not even a scratch.
Was it only the gate?
Before the Outer Castle Gate stood eight layers of Protective Magic to shield it, and within that barrier held the Shield Guard Unit—one hundred warriors and fifty mages—all of them intact.

‘Moreover, Professor Dante’s direct unit. At first I wondered why he’d brought outsiders at all….’

Beforehand, Professor Dante had made an unexpected decision about troop assignments: he had distributed the assassins he’d brought with him among the Sniper Unit, the Confusion Unit, and the Mobile Strike Team.
Because of this, among the commanders there had been whispers—surely this was nepotism, an attempt to inflate their own stock on the backs of our blood spilled?

‘…But they weren’t! They’re absolute monsters!?’

They swept across the entire battlefield.

Whoooosh—

Whenever their allies found themselves in danger, Grey’s Illusion Magic would burst forth, drawing the siege beasts’ attention with perfect timing.

Boom-boom-boom-crash!!

In that opening, the Mobile Strike Team—Yongsa and Kendrick Drake—charged forward like lightning, breaking through the stalemate.

Clang—

Whenever the line threatened to give way, black lightning would invariably strike. Valmond’s bullets found their marks with perfect precision, halting the enemy’s advance.
Sometimes he would shatter the legs of a siege beast preparing for a massive leap, neutralizing the threat before it could materialize.

They protected their allies with exquisite timing.
They exploited the enemy’s weaknesses mercilessly.

Professor Dante Hiaka’s direct command unit executed its maneuvers with almost miraculous precision.

‘We can do this…!’
‘We can actually win this…!!’

It was just as the commanders’ morale reached its peak.

A cry tore through the air.

In that instant, Aymon’s voice came screaming through as if his throat might tear.
The commander of the Shield Guard Unit was utterly bewildered.
Retreat?
But our role is to hold the line.
Yet a commander’s order was absolute.

“Fall back! Fall back, now!!”

He hastily withdrew the Protective Magic casters and shield warriors, but moments later, he understood why.

Bomiteka moved.

Its grotesquely split jaw clamped shut, and the lower mandible drew up to cover the bridge of its nose—the way an old man’s mouth looks with his dentures removed. Its head began to tilt upward. Someone recognized it: the “gesture of about to disgorge something massive” that Professor Dante had described. At the same moment, Bomiteka’s left eye sank inward, vanishing into that gaping maw.
From that trembling mouth, Bomiteka expelled its eye.

━━━━ .

It screamed through the void like a colossal cannonball, like a missile, hurtling toward the Outer Castle Wall. It shattered the air itself, birthing a Sonic Boom—and in that instant, countless commanders recoiled at the impossibility of its speed.

‘God help us…….’

That cannot be stopped.
Every one of them felt it in their bones.

* * *

There was a wretched cur floundering in a swamp.
Bomiteka.
The creature, stymied by the sluggish battle within the arena I had created, was frustration incarnate—and it moved exactly as I had foreseen. It would expel its left eye.
That left eye was layered in two: the outer shell possessed explosive force, while the inner core connected to the optic nerve through Mana, allowing it to survey everything in detail once the battlefield crumbled and the Outer Castle Gate was shattered. To sate its impatience.
I had been waiting for that.

Here.
There stood one elder.

He had made no secret of his conviction that he would only drag everyone down, that he existed merely to be a burden. Yet we knew the truth: there is no being whose inner fortitude runs deeper than an old man who carries his own shame.

Humans grow more imprisoned in themselves with each passing year, more trapped within their own confines. But this Martial Master—who had lived one hundred and thirty years doubting himself, honing himself without respite—had chosen to step forward, here and now.

Elder of the previous generation, head of the Warrior Department, founder of the Martial Combat Sect, quasi-Challenger—many were the titles that adorned him, and every one filled the old man with shame.
Yet he made no attempt to hide his true identity.

– I am…. well, let me think…. a former chief professor of Martial Combat Doctrine in the Warrior Department, appointed in the year 411…. but now, I suppose, I’m just a grandfather from some quiet village…….

He was the founder of the Martial Combat Sect’s Taiji.
A genius of unarmed combat who faced swordsmen without so much as a blade in hand.

The Punchking. Moong.

“Elise.”

Now was the moment to reveal the card I had been holding in reserve.

* * *

Ten minutes earlier.

If it had possessed a tail, it would have drooped.
Elise couldn’t grasp the complexities of war, but she had an almost uncanny gift for reading people’s hearts. So it was that she noticed, soon after the fighting began, Moong’s inner anguish.

For tens of minutes now, she’d been standing among the Shield Guard Unit soldiers, waiting alongside Moong.

As the Siege Beasts and One-Horned Demon Beasts pressed forward in a sluggish contest of strength against the Warrior mages, soldiers fell and were replaced in steady succession.

“Hold the front! Don’t let them through!”
“Wounded coming through! Make way for transport!”

Yet despite the battle unfolding barely ten meters ahead, Moong couldn’t see well enough to join the fray, and Elise couldn’t fight either—she had to guard him.

“Aaaagh!”
“Ughh, cough—!”

The screams of their own soldiers reached them.
A Martial Master was forced to stand idle.

……

In his silence, Moong sat tormented.

There had been a mage among them who kept throwing him sharp looks.
When his comrade was carried out with grievous wounds, it seemed he finally broke.

“Hey!”

He suddenly stepped out of formation and shouted at Elise.

“You two—what exactly are you doing here?”
“I, well—”
“What’s an old man and a girl doing standing around? Can’t you see the soldiers fighting? If you’re just going to get in the way, fall back!”

Elise flinched at the rebuke.
This bastard…?
Moong, already weighed down by his own helplessness, seemed to sink further into shame, while Elise felt a surge of anger and stepped forward.

“Now listen here—”

At that moment her wrist was suddenly jerked backward—Moong had pulled on the cord that bound the two of them together.

“It’s alright, child.”
“Grandfather…!”
“It’s fine. Stay here with me.”
“We should just fight ourselves. There’s no reason to mind what those people think.”
“Don’t do that. War is a commander’s chess game, and chess pieces must not move of their own accord.”
“But…”
“It’s alright. We have been allotted a precise moment. You know it yourself, don’t you? Our junior gave me his trust.”
……

Moong spoke with composure.

“I must honor that trust.”

After that, Moong closed his eyes once more and crossed his legs in meditation.
Elise’s heart churned with frustration, but she crouched quietly beside him and waited for the moment to come.

At the tail end of this chaos, Bomiteka’s lips began to tremble.

“C-casualties!”
“Retreat! Retreat!!”

Right after the Shield Guard Unit’s mages and warriors began scrambling backward in retreat.

The signal came through.

“Hey, you there! What are you doing? Get out of the way now!!”

One of the mages suddenly grabbed Elise’s arm, but she kicked him away.

Thud—

The struck man flew several meters and crashed into the ground, and as he gasped, “What—what is this?!” Elise helped Moong to his feet.

“Grandfather. It’s time.”

Among the retreating soldiers.
Moong slowly rose.
He spoke quietly.

“Take me to the center of the gate.”

Elise led him to the center of the gate, guiding the old man to where she calculated the projectile would come.

“How’s the angle and distance?”
“There. The distance is about 2,200 meters.”

Elise grasped the old man’s wrist and adjusted his position until he stood in perfect alignment with the target. Moong pointed a withered arm at the sky and extended his palm, imagining it—the sphere thirty meters across that would hang between his index and middle fingers.

At 2,200 meters, the visual angle was 0.86 degrees. At that distance, it would appear less than a centimeter.

“…Thank you, Elise.”

Elise cut the cord at his wrist. Then she drew the short blade at her hip—the Formless Sword—with a soft whisper. The old man spoke.

“Now you should go.”
“What? Me? …Why? I need to stay and protect you now that we’re about to engage—”

In an instant, something gently pushed Elise back.

Thump—

It was a force that even Elise, skilled as she was in the Combat Techniques of assassination, could not withstand. She flew helplessly dozens of meters, landing hard on the Castle Wall with her rear end first.

Elise scrambled to her feet and looked down over the wall, but by then Bomiteka was already raising its head.

“What—what is this! Why is that old man still down there!?”

The soldiers pointed in alarm.

“Damn it! Why didn’t anyone bring him back! Jackson! Go get him!”
“A-are you insane?! Not now!!”

As the soldiers panicked.

“Hey! Old man! Don’t stand there—run!!”

A mage shouted from across the way.

“You’ll die if you stay there!!”

That was when it happened. A colossal sphere screamed through the air. Something impossibly vast and swift tore across the sky, through the atmosphere, across the earth itself, and shattered the Protective Magic barrier at the Outer Castle Gate with a Sonic Boom, hurtling straight through.
It flew toward Moong, hands clasped together in prayer—

“…Hold firm, flesh and bone.”

In that instant, Taiji bloomed from the old man’s body.

『 Taiji – Realm – When Matter Reaches Extreme, It Reverses 』

The Taiji unfurled in a sphere, Mana spinning through all of space, curling the air itself. Within the eye of that maelstrom, Moong withdrew his hand stretched toward the heavens and pressed his palms together.
Then another hand materialized within the aura surrounding him.
That ‘colossal hand’ caught the projectile gently.

――.

Presently, every soldier on the castle wall gasped in horror.
The projectile that had been screaming toward them impossibly fast now hung motionless before Moong’s ‘colossal hand’. Or rather—a contest of force had begun.
The old man’s body, clasped in prayer and straining to hold, burst open. His skin tore. His bones cracked. His snowy white beard and brows were shredded to ribbons. Most horribly, his right hand began to rupture—fingers first, then the back of his hand, then his wrist—splitting open before their eyes!
Yet still the old man did not yield—

He flicked Bomiteka’s eye straight back at it.

Thwip ━━━━ .

The eyeball, bouncing back from the center, shot toward Bomiteka at the same impossible speed with which it had come.
It flew with perfect precision and shattered the right eye of that enormous head. *BOOM!!* An explosion two thousand two hundred meters away. And part of Bomiteka’s skull exploded outward.

“Ahhhhh!”
“We smashed it—!!”
“YESSSSSSS—!!”

The soldiers’ screams tore from their throats in trembling jubilation.
Moong, collapsed to his knees, understood it himself. He had done it.
At the same time, a thrill coursed through him.
As his vision dimmed, the exhilaration of battle—long absent from his life—came surging through that aged body like electric fire.

‘…I was a Martial Master, after all.’

But there was no time to savor it. The soldiers’ cheers shifted subtly.

“Wait—no, no—!!”
“What!? Danger! Elder, get back—!!”

Moong had already suspected as much.
His role was to deflect projectiles.

– You must absolutely intercept it, senior. The ‘eye’ is one of Bomiteka’s two weapons, capable of destroying everything from the Outer Castle Gate to the Inner Castle Gate in a single strike.

But when the projectile had come screaming in, all the soldiers had retreated, leaving only him kneeling before the castle gate.
Now was the Demon Beasts’ opportunity. Before formations could be reestablished, they had to breach the Outer Castle Gate at least.

“The monsters are coming!!”
“Return to formation, now! Quickly!!”

Moong’s prediction had come to pass.
Yet even as their commander lay mortally wounded, the Siege Beasts pressed forward with such savage fury that the soldiers began to hesitate, reluctant to fall back.
The Demon Race were charging like madmen.

“Hey! You warrior bastards! What are you doing—!?”

The mage who had mocked Moong earlier trembled at the old man’s power, and now, burning with shame at his own presumption, he watched in fury as the warriors froze, unable to break through the formation and mount a defense.

“Go and hold the line! Damn it, you worthless dogs!!”

When the soldiers didn’t move, he lunged frantically toward the castle wall to leap down himself, but they grabbed him and held him back.

“What are you doing, you fool!”
“Hey! Is now the time for you to stop me?! Go and hold them back!!”
“Stay put! The order hasn’t come! There’s no point anyway—we can’t hold them!”

At the same moment, a similar scene was unfolding elsewhere. This time it was Elise. Someone caught her forearm as she rushed forward in alarm. ‘…!’ Her pink eyes snapped backward frantically.

“Don’t go.”

Elise’s hand trembled.
The Siege Beasts swept forward in a blur.
Blood spilled from Moong’s lips.
The units unleashed cannon fire and magic in desperate counterattack.

“Save that old man—!!”

The mage’s voice cracked with desperation.

In that grotesque battlefield.
The old man felt an unexpected peace.

“…One’s lifespan rests in heaven’s hands.”

Death had long been waiting for him. He had thought it best to drift away in sleep, in his chamber, yet he could not deny a certain longing remained—but if he could save so many young ones here on the battlefield before departing, what a beautiful thing that would be.
Moong waited for his end. This is a fitting conclusion, he thought.

“Not today.”

A voice reached his ears then.
Tap.
Footsteps followed.
Someone had stepped in front of Moong.

“You still have work to do for Hiaka, senior.”

His junior had arrived.

“…….”

Moong laughed.

A memory suddenly surfaced—the day he was summoned to the royal court. The previous king had held him back, denied his resignation, and forced him to walk the battlefields for fifty years since.
…A feeling that something had gone terribly wrong.

“What—!?”

Through the fire, smoke, and cascade of spells and cannon fire—when it all cleared, a man in black assassin’s garb stood revealed.
The soldiers gasped, their eyes snapping toward him.
While eyeless monsters, their master now blind, hurled themselves forward, a single figure stood before the old man.
The man’s name was,

“D-Professor Dante—!”
“What are you doing there! Get out of there, now!!”
“All units! Go protect him immediately!!”

The commanders who had accepted even Moong’s death now cried out in horror. He was the supreme commander. A man who could not, under any circumstances, fall.

Yet Dante did not retreat.

Before hundreds of watching soldiers, dozens of warriors vaulted down from the castle wall, rushing to shield him.

“If you resist, I’ll break you. I have no use for tools that won’t obey.”

Dante murmured words without meaning and drew his blade from its sheath.

He leveled the sword vertically at the enemies closing in upon him.

Behind him, warriors came rushing out in desperate haste.

Facing hundreds of Demon Race head-on.

Mana exploded outward.

Dante Hiaka spoke the Activation Incantation of his weapon.

“Take up the blade. Georbyeong—”

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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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