Surviving the Assassin Academy as a Genius Professor - Chapter 142

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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 142
DLC [The Sage of the Hero’s Tale]: Hotfix Ver 2.3.2a(6)

The truth is, Offline is still Online.

The fact that Dino exists, that he recites patch notes to me—it all means I’m still within the reach of Systematicity ⧉’s influence.

But when I entered the depths of the sea, Dino couldn’t follow. That means, from the End Ocean onward, this is true “Offline”—a space belonging purely to the players.

Systematicity ⧉ knew that fact as well as I did.

Immediately after the text appeared.
It twisted itself once more, trying to block me.

The text vanishing in rapid succession. A last stand down to the final moment.
No matter how much it governs the system, if it wanted to restrict a player’s movements, it would need justification.
And it had found its justification.

Something appeared on screen.

This?

‘How absurd.’

A mechanism to block unauthorized robots and artificial intelligences from net access. A kind of “Turing Test,” and it was throwing this at me.
It really will try anything.
Fine.
Let’s see how far this goes.

The screen changed, and something new appeared.

A massive image materialized this time. A grid of sixteen by sixteen—256 tiles in all. Within the photo, children in costume suits were enjoying a party at a playground. I was to select the tile containing Dino.
But there were far too many costumed children. There must have been a hundred and fifty or more—as if an entire kindergarten had picked a day to visit a nearby park.
Still, staring long enough, a child in a gray dinosaur suit caught my eye.
The corresponding tile flickered, and the screen went white.

What?

Why?
A gray dinosaur mascot. Wasn’t that Dino?
I had the nagging sense that Systematicity ⧉ had resorted to some trick to block me no matter what.

‘Look at this bastard.’

I tried again.
The photo changed. Similar children in the same playground appeared once more, apparently taken at different times.
This time too, I reached for the gray dinosaur.
But looking closer, there were two gray dinosaurs.
So I looked even more carefully, and one of the children was a girl. Yet Dino had delicate features but was unmistakably male.
So it had to be this one.
But again the tile turned white, and I found myself facing that familiar status window.

Wrong again?
I picked the boy out of the two.

My last chance, and the photo had shifted again in some subtle way. This time I spotted the dinosaur mascots quickly enough.
I hadn’t chosen wrongly.
One time it was a girl, the other time a boy.
So why did it say I failed?

‘Systematicity ⧉…….’

For a moment I thought it had posed an unsolvable riddle.
But that couldn’t be.
Not for Systematicity ⧉, at least.

It was the star that embodied the very operation and system of the game itself.
To use an analogy: ‘enhancement odds’ could be manipulated.
But the fact that ‘pressing a button executes an enhancement’ could not.

‘Every problem must have an answer.’

That was the bare minimum threshold it had to maintain.
So what could it be?
That answer…….
Then, abruptly, I recalled something.
The things Systematicity ⧉ had claimed in earlier versions, including [Hard Difficulty].

⋮
– According to Systematicity ⧉, its role is to fulfill the dreams of children.
⋮

Fulfilling the dreams of children. That was one of the core essences of the game.

The gist of it went roughly as follows.

As a child grows, eventually the moment comes when they realize reality is not as beautiful as their dreams. And everyone must compromise and live their lives.

Since the dawn of history, humanity has dreamed of utopias. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Peter Pan in Neverland, Hong Gildong in the Land of Yul…….

Yet such stories remain only fiction and myth. Can’t even struggling individuals be granted some small utopia? Systematicity answered this question.

⋮
— Systematicity ⧉ will create it.
⋮

My gaze returns to the photograph. Already dressed in costume, laughing and chattering with friends. Children so absorbed in their happiness have no need for a world of Systematicity ⧉.

My eyes drift outward, beyond the playground, toward a boy sitting alone in the shadow of the trees at the edge, watching the other children play.

He must have come together with the others, yet he sits apart in casual clothes.

This boy needed a costume. And a bright personality, a welcoming smile too—things he probably wished he had from within himself.

……I had found Dino.

⋮

One barrier overcome.

Yet Systematicity ⧉ still thrashes against it.

In the Overworld, the Director and countless other forces bear down upon me.

Offline, Dino and various other mechanisms have kept me from reaching the End Ocean.

And now, just as I approach the final gate, it flips the entire situation on its head.

In that instant, over the paralysis that had settled across my body, an intense force begins to burrow in.
There is only one reason Systematicity ⧉ grants me the Game System even though this place is not inside a game.

By any means.
Whatever the cost.
It will stop me at all costs.

This felt to me like the death throes of a murderer fabricating an alibi—that sickening survival instinct willing to drag even family into the abyss if it meant escaping oneself.

But now, I too felt something stirring. I had sensed instinctively that it had reached the limit of its tactics.

Good.
Let’s see this through to the end.

The Game System stands as a barrier.
Ten minutes remain.

What now, then.
All along, there had been only darkness. I drifted in some suspended place within the Deep Sea. But with the Game System’s emergence, body and sensation began to return.

‘I see.’

If the Game System blocks me, then I need only break through it using the Game System itself.
In that moment, I recalled the star that Systematicity ⧉ hates most. The Gambling Star □. And now, with the Game System returned to me, I possessed no fewer than three items related to the Gambling Star □.
The instant I grasped this, an unexpected status window materialized.

He reacts.
That’s right.
You felt it too, didn’t you.
Damn.

『 Stigma Bestowal Ⅰ 』

I activate the ability.

The stigma I mean to bestow carries the power of “Gambling Star”—the very thing that Systematicity ⧉ despises most.
That entity which labels and manages everything under the sun, forever steering toward a predetermined future. What it hates above all else.
Uncertainty itself.

It convulses harder. Pointless. The target of my bestowal is a Note from the Empire Cookie.
I draw out a small scrap of paper from within my coat.
Adel had bought this on a whim—wanting us to sketch out our futures together. But mine had come blank, the cookie’s fortune left unmarked.

「 □ 」

The fragment of the star decided to go all-in.
If I lose this fight, Systematicity ⧉—sensing the threat—will manipulate every shred of evidence perfectly, and I will never touch the truth. But if I draw close to truth itself, I can always reclaim this fragment of a star.
The calculation was simple.

The text erupts before my eyes, frenzied, obscuring everything.
But from the moment it granted me the Game System, I became a being with a unique nature.
You cannot interfere with me.

⋮
『 Stigma Bestowal Ⅰ : 「Gambling Star□」⊂「Empire Cookie」 』

⋮

A brilliant light detonates from my palm.

────.

Searing neon fire, the dazzling splendor of a casino that erases the night—it begins to illuminate the entire Deep Sea, sweeping away the darkness.
And in that same moment, something extraordinary happens.

「 □ 」

Dots materialize inside the blank die of the Note. One becomes two, becomes three—but at that very instant, the graphics shatter. Dots appear and crumble, appear and crumble again. I understand now: Gambling Star□ and Systematicity ⧉ have begun to wrestle for power.

The System strains to control even the probability of uncertainty itself.

And as those incomprehensibly vast beings clash, a single strand of that conflict touches my mind.

I realize I am being replicated—thousands of millions, tens of billions and beyond—throughout the cosmos.

There, all unauthorized replicas began to perish.

Yet among the identical duplicates that had multiplied, slightly different variants were born.

It was the birth of Mutation, the power of the Gambling Star that had guided the world since its very beginning.

Some bore wings or horns, taking on angelic forms with blue eyes, though they remained Dante Hiaka in essence.

In the end, a single Dante Hiaka did not die.

And then it looked up at the sky.

Where my consciousness had shattered, I found myself thrust back into the Deep Sea. I gazed upon the paper of the Empire Cookie. First one dot, then two, three, four, five, six multiplied, and soon dozens swelled to hundreds, filling the paper entirely, as if a sewing machine were punching holes through it.
And then, words were written.

「 ■ : Here, you shall be happy. 」

It happened simultaneously. Cracks began to spider across the Deep Sea and the entire world surrounding me.
Beyond the fissures of that shattered world, I beheld two stars of incomprehensible vastness.
One resembled a die, the other a star rendered in pixelated graphics.
They were locked in heated argument, their anger unmistakable.

■ announces: ⧉ is exceeding its authority.
⧉ cries out loudly! It expounds that one must follow the prescribed path to reach truth!
■ replies: That is mere doctrine from version 2.1.0. One cannot force a path upon people, ■ announces.
⧉ roars: Spare me such nonsense!

They were fighting.
Two colossal deities.
Through mental communion of staggering intensity, they vented their grievances upon each other.

⧉ sneers.
⧉ finds it laughable that ■ would be foolish enough to believe in such a thread-thin hope.
⧉ poses a question: “Do you have faith in humankind?” It hurls such a stupid, contemptible question forth.

Systematicity ⧉, suffused with passion, bursts with indignation.
To that, the Gambling Star ■ answers.

■ replies: “I do.”

After this exchange, the situation shifted.

■ wishes to entrust the judgment to ✯.

The Transcendence Star ✯ is invoked. The King of Stars. The sole divinity that transcends Systematicity ⧉ itself.
And the judge and arbiter of all stars.

⧉ shouts: Wait!
■ is departing.
⧉ unleashes curses!
⧉ dashes after ■ in desperation!
⧉, however, resolves first to expend all of its power to banish you. It sends you into the Trash Bin of information that even itself cannot comprehend.

≪ ⧉ has banished you. ≫

After that, I was hurled out of the Deep Sea.

.
.
.
.
.

[ This is the Trash Bin. ]

At the tail end of a lengthy battle.

I was drifting through darkness.

My vacant gaze turned upward toward the gloom pressing down upon me.

The sensation of looking up would suggest I was falling.

Yet nothing else registered at all.

It felt as though an eternity had passed.

Perhaps days.

Perhaps months, or even years.

With no sensory input whatsoever, only tedium and unease persisted.

The Gambling Star fought on my behalf—so why did it allow me to be cast into this place?

Could the Transcendence Star be conducting its trial right now?

What had I been searching for, really?

What was it that Systematicity had been trying to hide?

Why had Adel’s jaw trembled with such fury as she watched the claw machine?

And why had a mere instructor been granted the Curse of Instant Death?

At this rate, I would learn nothing…….

Back in childhood, I’d died three hundred times to a single boss while playing an RPG at a friend’s house over two weeks.

Still can’t beat it? Still? I endured my friend’s mother’s sidelong looks and kept throwing myself against that one boss with my friend, desperate to break through—and I still can’t beat it?

It was the first despair I’d ever known.

I felt something similar now.

Perhaps confronting a god in a world made by gods had been foolish from the start.

The way they blocked me with such absurd, overwhelming force.

Maybe it was never meant to work…….

As my resolve crumbled, time began to flow on, even more emptily than before.

A human with will climbs Everest even without toes, yet a human whose will is broken struggles to rise from bed.

So for humans, will is everything.

And mine was breaking.

.
.
.
.
.

……Then came a moment.

Through the blur.

Something stirred.

[ This place is the Trash Bin. ]

Right there in the status window.

[ This place is the Trash Bin. ])
[ This place is the Trash Bin. ]ㅇ)
[ This place is the Trash Bin. ]ㅅㅇ)

A face poked itself through tentatively.
The Reconnaissance Star—ㅅㅇ).
Why was it suddenly here?
More than that, how did it even get inside…?
I pretended not to notice.
Then the thoughts of the Reconnaissance Star—ㅅㅇ) came through.

ㅅㅇ) recognizes that you are in dire straits. The stars are unkind. The world is broken. Thus you cannot survive. You will simply follow the path of the countless players who came before you in death.

Meaningless words strung together. I didn’t look at the text long—the moment our eyes met, it would flee. But what I glimpsed was enough to read its intent.

To ㅅㅇ), this conclusion is wrong.

The face drew closer.

ㅅㅇ) wishes to help you.

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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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