Surviving the Assassin Academy as a Genius Professor - Chapter 132

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

Episode 132
[Incursion] One-Horned Demon Race Vomittekka (5)

“Park Dominic Opus….”
“Holy Mother, hear us….”

Some four hundred refugees had gathered in the Cathedral. Prayers drifted down among them like fallen snow.

“It’s all right. Loui…. As long as you’re with Mama, you’re safe…. It’s all right….”
“…….”

A mother held her child close, murmuring the same reassurance over and over. Everything will be fine. Everything will be fine.
But into that fragile calm, someone cried out.

“…coming!”

It was a soldier guarding the shelter.
Everyone turned.

“Everyone, on your feet! A massive creature is approaching! Head underground immediately!”
“What?!”
“A beast is coming! This way! Move to the basement at once! Don’t go outside!”

The sanctuary descended into chaos in moments.

“Don’t go outside? If it’s headed here, we should run!”
“We’ll all die crushed if the basement collapses on us!”
“Follow orders! Move now! The Cathedral basement is secure!!”

Arguments splintered through the crowd. The soldier kept pushing them toward the basement, but the panicked flock refused to move as one.

“Everyone, calm yourselves!”

Then a man stepped forward and stilled them all.
He was broad-shouldered and wore heavy plate armor—a cheerful warrior’s face.

“I am Hbaten, knight of the Count! I give you my word—your safety is now my charge!”

A knight of the Count!
At those words, relief bloomed in the refugees’ eyes.

“But…can one man truly stand? They say the beast that shattered the gates….”
“Our knights are already riding to this place, as is the full garrison! They will hold this line!”
“But…still….”
“You must control your fear!”

He raised his voice, commanding.

“In a crisis, panic itself causes the greatest harm! For now, I ask you to wait. Once I’ve assessed the situation, I’ll guide you further. Trust in order.”

Hearing this, the mother spoke to her child.

“There. The knight will save us, Loui.”
“…….”

The child nodded.
He seemed a strong and righteous knight indeed. Even as he turned to leave, he kept glancing back at the refugees with concern etched on his face.
Had he instead looked forward then, what might he have seen?
His death was utterly hollow. The stone-forged sky descended upon him as he walked, and he never even had time to scream. His body was crushed, compressed slowly into the earth beneath until it vanished entirely.
Crash—!!
The underground trembled with the impact, as a colossal boulder rolled forward and smashed through one of the Cathedral’s walls.
Darkness swallowed the interior instantly. The townsfolk felt a creeping wrongness that they couldn’t name. What they’d taken for an immeasurably vast stone began to feel disturbingly like a human skull.
Though the ten-meter Cathedral wall lay in ruins, all that was visible were the orbital socket of one eye and the bridge of a nose.
Even breathing grew sparse within the Cathedral.
Then the center of the eyelid split vertically, and a broken, blood-red eye opened. It moved slowly, then stopped—fixed on something.
It had locked gazes with a child cradled in its mother’s arms, the nearest living soul.

“…….”

Hundreds of townsfolk were present, yet none of them screamed or moved.
In that silence.
Through the window, the monster’s remaining lower jaw began to open.
As if about to bite down in a single, massive chomp.

* * *

The Hero runs toward the Cathedral. I am running as well, but he is faster. It seems he will arrive before Eimon’s knights reach it.

The Hero, Glory.

I have spoken with him several times. I once called him to a tactical briefing to explain the operation. Yet the Hero’s eyes remained as vacant as a puppet with severed strings.

– Do you understand the operation?

When I asked, the Hero—with his tattered sky-blue hair and the dazed, drugged look in his eyes—simply stared at me blankly. Then, from a mouth split by blows I didn’t know the source of, he answered, mangling his words.

– …If there are Demon Race, I kill them.
– You need to understand the operation to kill them.
– …If people are in danger, I save them.
– So then. The operation?
– …….

He said nothing more after that. When the briefing ended, he simply walked out, pulled a cheap bottle of liquor from his pocket, and crammed it into his mouth. Then he picked up an abandoned cigarette butt from the ground and began smoking. After a few hacking coughs, he just collapsed and fell asleep right there in the dirt.

Impossible to pin down, that man.

– Hmm, something seems off about him?
– He appears to be strong, but he’s nearly impossible to communicate with. I wouldn’t worry about it too much.
– Hmm… I don’t like it.

Even the Dante Assassination Squad seemed to regard him as a lost cause.

But when the war erupted, I became certain he was indeed the Hero—and he was astonishingly powerful. He wielded Holy† as a basic skill, yet his strike power far exceeded even most Grandmasters.

Judging by raw strength alone, I’d estimate his ranking at around 700. Yet he looks to be only in his mid-twenties.

Without him, the outer walls would have been breached from the flanks by siege weapons long ago.

Truly, his name and title were fitting.

● The Hero Glory

Throughout my preparations for the Vomittekka War, I kept thinking. About the structure of this world.

The DLC The Professor of Hero Stories was ultimately a premise that affirmed the confrontation between Hero and Demon King, and a title that spoke to the figure destined to defeat the Demon King being the Hero.

Which meant the fate of this world rested on the shoulders of that hopeless youth.

Conveniently, according to the synchronized information, the Empire possessed a Holy Sword†, and the Hero would have to draw it soon.

In other words, the world was his to save.

And I—whether by teaching him, or by reshaping the world’s paradigm toward the Demon Race—had to fulfill my duty as a Professor.

So when the boy emerged unscathed and now rushed toward Vomittekka, I anticipated this crisis would resolve far more easily than I’d feared.

Vomittekka’s life force was down to roughly five to ten percent.

The only reason I decided to check the outcome once more was that the information about a [Bug] afflicting the Hero troubled me.

⋮
『 World Forgery : Time Forgery [60 seconds / 20 frames] 』
⋮

The Hero charged into the Cathedral and struck Vomittekka’s massive jaw.
In the same instant, Vomittekka swallowed the Cathedral whole.
As the building crumbled, the Hero continued swinging his blade, and with each strike from that toothpick-thin weapon, bombs seemed to detonate across the creature’s enormous body.

Then, abruptly.
Something went wrong.
After a woman and child were sucked into Vomittekka’s jaw, the Hero changed—his manner shifted into something feral.
“Hyaaaaaaah…!!”
Roaring, the Hero lunged into Vomittekka’s mouth and shattered the clenched teeth. In doing so, something shot out from inside that maw and snapped his blade clean in half.

Even with half the jaw shattered, thick hide covered the wound. Glory howled like a madman, hammering at the front teeth with his fists, headbutting the creature over and over until he finally broke them.
“Hey! Someone pull him out!”
“W-wait, that’s wrong! He’s completely insane!!”
While the watching knights froze in horror, Glory dove straight into the shattered gap between Vomittekka’s front teeth.

As Eimon convulsed as if someone had shoved a sweet potato down his throat, by the time I arrived, Vomittekka had crushed every last tooth in its head and snapped its jaw shut. *Crack-crunch!*
The Hero had been swallowed.
“G-Glory’s been eaten!”
“What—what is that thing!? Why is it like that!?”
All the soldiers who’d just arrived stood paralyzed in shock.
In that moment, I could only stand there, staring blankly, unable to comprehend what was happening.
Moments later, Vomittekka’s insides fractured and the creature died—but a status window appeared, and it was despair incarnate.

Multiple status windows cascaded after that.
⋮
「 Bad Ending : Death of the Hero 」
⋮
「 Bad Ending : Death of the Hero 」)
「 Bad Ending : Death of the Hero 」ㅇ)
「 Bad Ending : Death of the Hero 」ㅅㅇ)
⋮
Time rushed forward. The sky turned pitch black. No stars were visible. By then, after years of effort, I stood on the threshold of confronting the Demon King—only to halt before something I could not comprehend.
At the end of the longest path, in that final moment, we could not kill the Demon King.
There was no way to kill it.
Because Glory was gone.
The moment I understood that, everything—the hazy world, all of it—shattered and crumbled.

“…….”

When I opened my eyes, I saw the Cathedral. I saw the jaw exploding from the Hero’s charging blow. I saw Vomittekka’s eyes rolling back as its jaw clenched tight. I saw the Hero’s assault growing more frenzied.

At last, Eimon’s shout pierced through.
No!
Damn it all.

>
>

Through the frames that had cut out, Eimon’s panicked voice now came through in sharper detail.

“Ahhhhhhh……!!”

I understood at once.
A mother and child had been swallowed by Vomittekka. The Hero was throwing himself at it to save two people!
He wasn’t thinking about the long term — that his death would mean the world’s end.
Now I grasped something about Glory. He was someone who despised the Demon Race and sought to save people. A Hero so blindly zealous he bordered on the idiotic!

>

I gritted my teeth harder and ran. By the time I reached the Cathedral, Glory had headbutted his own skull open and drove himself straight into Vomittekka’s front teeth.

“No, this can’t be!!”
“This lunatic…!”

The knights and assassins nearby, who had been evacuating civilians and protecting the people, cried out in horror.

>

This was the moment.
Right here, right now. I had to do something. And there was only one thing I could do.
But I had no sense of whether I’d survive it.
A jaw like a building gaped wide — Glory had entered, and it was about to close, shattering its own teeth to make sure he never came back out.
There was no room for choice, no time to think.

“P-Professor Dante!?”
“You can’t go in there!”

I lunged straight into those teeth.

>

As Eimon’s manic transmission came through, I was at the entrance of Vomittekka’s maw. I raised my hands and deployed the Colossus Soldier Sword○ to its maximum. I drove the blade into that mouth and stretched both arms to grip the upper and lower jaws as they tried to close.

“Professor Dante, what on earth—!”
“It’s too dangerous! Please get out of there——!!”

Massive cavern-like walls squeezed in from both sides, crushing down on me.

Thump——

For an instant, my breath caught in my throat. I was receiving, through my own body, the pressure that the Colossus Soldier Sword○ — bound to me by Mana — was enduring.

With both arms splayed wide, I felt as if the entire world was trying to compress me into nothing, and I pushed back against it. That was my limit. I could do nothing more. Even just holding the jaws open was pushing my arms to the brink; the crushing pressure was bearing down on my body.

Yet Vomittekka’s jaw did not close.
I was holding the force at bay.

>

Eimon, having grasped something, roared.

The soldiers who had maintained distance felt something too and rushed forward desperately.

“We have to save Professor Dante! Smash the jaw!!”
“Destroy that thing’s jaw—!! Artillery! Mages!!”

Magic, cannon fire, the massively enlarged warriors, everyone gathered near the creature—they all began striking the jaw with all their strength.

“Professor!!”

Elise’s urgent cry. Valmond’s bullets of black lightning. The thunderous axe-blow from Kendrick Drake wielding the Santa Barbara—all came crashing down on the jaw.

“Professor! Is that strange one Glory the reason for all this?”

Grey, sharp and quick to read the situation, grasped what was happening and came forward to stand before me.
I wanted to tell her to get away, but I’d reached my limit—I couldn’t even speak. My eyes had already burst, bleeding freely. It was then that Grey shouted directly into the Vomittekka’s maw.

“Glory, you bastard—get out now—!!”

Get out now…

Get out now…

Get out now……

The shout echoed and reverberated.

Then came footsteps.

Two human figures—a mother and a child, both about to be dissolved and absorbed into the darkness—were lifted bodily and torn free.

Judging by the blood covering him, he’d fought against the ‘small Vomittekka’ living inside the beast’s maw in those brief moments.

“Stop posturing and get out here, you bastard—!!”

Glory was slapped across the face by Grey and sent reeling out.

“Professor, let’s get out too. Okay…?”

The cat’s expression filled with concern.

Just then, the Vomittekka’s jaw shattered.

Grey caught me as I collapsed.

It was victory in war.

⋮

[Incursion]

One-Horned Demon Race Vomittekka

END

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