Surviving the Assassin Academy as a Genius Professor - Chapter 31

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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 31
EP11 – Professor’s Assassination: Illusion Magic (2)

The crowd demands endlessly.
That heroes prove themselves anew.

Yesterday’s glory swiftly becomes yesterday, and emotional fervor cools like tea in a cup.
So the exceptional must constantly prove their exceptionalism.
Fail to do so, and they’ll be condemned for daring to inspire such expectations. The smallest flaw will be seized upon, dissected, and turned against them.

Professor Dante was no hero. Yet he’d come to be treated as something much like one.
His evasion of assassination on the first day. The Marina-Elise incident. The interception of the proxy assassination. The murder of Professor Hacon. These and more had made him a kind of celebrity professor.
And so some students had begun to question his teaching methods.

Strong—sure, they got that much.
But was his pedagogy sound?
Did he truly have the qualifications to teach something as comprehensive and rigorous as the 12 Ability Systems?
These doubts had grown as he dragged on for over two weeks with the tedious History of Abilities course, building steadily until today.

Amid such anticipation and skepticism.
In a lecture hall drawing the eyes of every student—

“How does one go about killing a person?”

Professor Dante began his lecture.

“This was a question that began long ago with an elder brother, consumed by jealousy of his younger sibling.”

His voice was calm yet weighted.

“God seemed to favor the younger brother alone, and one day, as envy burned in the elder’s heart, he resolved to kill him. Somewhere unseen by others would be best, he thought. And so he spoke to his brother: ‘My brother, let us go out to the fields together.'”

The professor seized the wrist of an assistant instructor who stood dazed and pulled him down from the dais. ‘Oh my.’

“And then the elder looked around. There happened to be a suitable tool at hand.”

Suddenly, a “sharp stone” materialized in midair.
For the students, it was an astonishing display of Illusion Magic.
There wasn’t the slightest trace of Magical Trace to accompany it.

“In humanity’s first murder, the scripture tells us that the younger brother’s blood soaked the fields. The tool was likely a club or stone.”

Dante made as if to strike Adel with it. ‘Goodness,’ Adel murmured, settling into her chair as laughter rippled through the students.

“But here’s the problem—as the first murder weapon, a club or stone proved quite inefficient. The brother didn’t die in one blow. He had to chase him down, catch him, and kill him. The screams drew the attention of their parents. That was the flaw. It lacked concealment.”

In an instant, the lecture hall’s floor inverted. ‘Wow.’ A barren field stretched before their eyes, and blood that seemed to flow from Adel stained the ground.
Every student doubted their own vision. The Illusion Magic was shockingly—impossibly—detailed.

‘Whoa. What is this.’
‘Insane. Is that really Illusion Magic…?’

To fill such vast space with such meticulous form, without a single spark of Magical Trace flickering into view?
Even at a student’s level, controlling the Magical Trace while conjuring a single match was difficult.

‘…….’

At the same moment, shock registered across Louise’s face as well.

“After that, he had to live his entire life in fear that someone would kill him.”

Despite weaving Illusion Magic of such a distant, unreachable realm that they would never attain it even with a lifetime of effort, Professor Dante spoke without hesitation.

“A murderer, and yet he feared his own death. So at some point, he must have regretted it—that he should have killed his brother more discreetly. Unknown to his father, unknown to his mother. Unknown even to God itself…….”

From this point forward, humanity’s deliberation on assassination begins.

Dante swiftly traced through the History of Abilities, tracing how the 12 Ability Systems had developed.

They had to kill the man with a sword—the Combat System. Then came the bow and throwing stars—the Throwing System.

To close the distance to a man with a bow and kill him, the Movement Technique was born.

Before the Movement Technique could be properly used for assassination, the gun—the Sniper System—was developed to kill from afar.

And to defend against guns, the Magic System arose.

“By the age of magic, there were no more assassins who relied on a single method.”

When direct approach became impossible, Concealment emerged to reach nonetheless.
Traps were devised to sever the legs of the moving target.
When traps alone could not kill, Poison was employed to bring death through a small wound.
Where an assassin could not carry weapons into forbidden places, Alchemy and Totem were developed to create them on site…….
Assassination evolved in this way.

“In modern times, humanity began to contemplate the very foundation of assassination. And at the end of that contemplation, our predecessors discovered remarkable possibility in what had been nothing more than a depraved amusement of mages.”

The professor called it Illusion Magic.
Until then, Illusion Magic had been an art that manipulated sensation—used only as a vulgar entertainment for the nobility.
But everything changed when it fell into the hands of assassins.

“The foundation of Illusion Magic is the distortion of perception. Making the unseen visible, and making the unheard audible—that is the purpose of its existence. Taken to its extreme, it becomes possible to distort not just the five senses and magical presence, but existence itself.”

Professor Dante snapped his fingers.

Snap—

Five handsome, well-built men materialized around Adel, who sat in her chair, encircling her.

“Oh my….”

Each was a phantom—an obsessive collector, a massive dog-man, an avant-garde type, a middle-aged gentleman, a wretched feline-faced man.
They bent their bodies around her, gazing down at her with hungry eyes.

“Oh my, oh my, oh my….”

Startled, Adel turned crimson and spun around, covering everything but her eyes as she looked about in a daze.

“Well, Adel? How does it feel to be surrounded by false men?”
“What do you take me for…? ……I rather like it….”

Laughter erupted among the cadets.

“Assassination is a word that blends killing and deception. And Illusion Magic is deception elevated to the highest art.”

“The most crucial element in distorting perception is understanding what the target desires to perceive. For humans always sense what they wish to sense. Once that is achieved, the rest follows—”

Snap—

Professor Dante snapped his fingers again, and five men drew swords, leveling them at Adel.
Adel tried to twist free in alarm, but it was futile. The men’s arms and legs were wound around her like serpents.
Like the poster for some risqué film—a tableau frozen on the brink of murder.

“……Please, Professor. Spare me.”

As Adel carefully raised both hands, another wave of laughter rippled through the students.

“A word of caution, Teaching Assistant—beware handsome men.”
“Yes, sir….”

When Dante dismissed the phantoms, Adel finally exhaled as if she’d narrowly escaped death.

By this point, every student in the room was utterly absorbed in the lesson.

Louise and her friends were no exception.

‘This is insane. Wow….’
‘I mean, what’s with a brand-new professor’s ability level?’

All their doubts about Dante, which had festered until moments before, shattered in an instant.

And the skeptical posture they’d held while evaluating his formal instruction evaporated without a trace.

The arc of thought running from the history of assassination to Illusion Magic itself. Concrete examples of just how destructive that Illusion Magic could be……. And the near-perfect execution of the ability that demonstrated it all.

Now every student in the lecture hall hung on his every word, drinking in each syllable with full attention.

* * *

Yet even as the entire student body fell captive to his instruction,
one mind harbored a different thought.
It belonged to Elise Cxicos, a student of Jamlong Academy.

‘……??’

A pencil resting on her philtrum.
Listening to the lecture with vacant eyes, lips puckered, she suddenly jerked her hand upward at a question that surfaced in her mind.

“Professor. I have a question.”

Professor Dante gestured for her to proceed.

“Ask.”

The students turned toward them both with interest.
When you thought about it, Elise and Dante’s lesson were polar opposites.

Unlike Dante’s Illusion Magic, which revealed and displayed,
Elise was the daughter of the Muyoungseong-jwa, a student whose talent lay in disappearing—in the art of becoming unseen.

“Do you really need Illusion Magic for assassination?”
“Elaborate.”
“Ah, well. Assassination means killing someone in secret, right? So wouldn’t it be enough to hide and strike?”

Just as the other students had anticipated, a fundamental question cut through the air.
‘Disappearing’ was the assassin’s founding principle.
And no student disappeared better than Elise.
Her family, renowned for nothing but the art of vanishing, had risen beyond a hundred generations to be hailed as the finest assassination house across the entire Hiaca Continent.

‘I wonder how the professor will answer this one?’
‘This is genuinely difficult….’
‘How do I explain that revealing is as important as disappearing in front of Elise?’

While the cadets held their breath in anticipation, Dante opened his mouth with perfect ease.

“Elise. Do you know how to hide a tree?”
“How to hide a tree?”

Snap! The moment Dante flicked his fingers, a tree materialized directly in front of Elise.
Elise stared at it with a dazed expression before reaching out and touching it.

“Like this, then….”

Then something extraordinary happened. The phantom tree turned transparent and vanished.
The cadets gasped in astonishment—Elise had overlaid Concealment onto a phantom that was actively occupied by someone else’s Magical Trace.

‘That’s insane. She applied Concealment to an Illusion Magic she just saw for the first time?’
‘What is she? Even for someone from Jamlong Academy, how could she….’

Even a professor would struggle to reach that level of mastery. Yet Dante simply nodded without any sign of concern.

“Well done. But there is no reason to claim that only disappearance qualifies as being ‘hidden.'”
“Is that so?”

At Dante’s gesture, the tree that Elise had made vanish reappeared.

Snap!

The moment he flicked his finger, a violent gust swept through the room.

Whoooosh!

When the cadets opened their eyes, a dozen trees in phantom form now stood before them.

With no Magical Trace visible this time either, the cadets fell into shock as Professor Dante posed his question.

“I ask you: where is the tree?”

Elise and every other cadet opened their eyes wide.

“……!”

With a dozen identical trees gathered in one place, there was no way to distinguish which was the original.

“…I don’t know.”

Elise blinked, then gave her answer, and Dante asked again.

“Then is that tree ‘hidden’?”
“Yes….”
“Precisely. So another way to hide a tree is simply to place it within a forest.”

Only then did the cadets grasp it fully—why ‘revealing’ was just as crucial as ‘disappearing.’
‘Concealment’ was not an isolated act, but a phenomenon born from interaction with one’s surroundings.

‘Ah, so that’s why a sniper in a crowd is harder to catch….’
‘Wasn’t there a case where an assassin disguised themselves among the palace guards and killed royalty?’

Understanding settled upon that place.

“From this class onward, you will learn the fundamentals of Illusion Magic from me.”

The remainder of the lesson flowed as though through a dream, languid and hazy.
The students learned the fundamentals of Illusion Magic from Dante, while those who already knew it received instruction in more advanced techniques. Everyone took the class with such joy.
In that moment of collective delight, however—
Professor Dante shattered their happiness.

“There will be an assignment for today’s class. The volume isn’t substantial, so don’t worry.”

Yet when the students gazed upon the two pages of assignment material before them, their expressions began to darken steadily.
The assignment was extensive.
Not merely extensive—it was impossibly, unfathomably vast.

‘Wait… is this really it…?’
‘How are we supposed to finish all of this by next week…?’

The students sat in shocked silence. Yet Dante did not always consult the Script, and so he had simply spoken according to his own measure without much thought.

“If you concentrate, you can finish it in fifteen minutes.”

The students blinked.

‘What kind of nonsense is that.’

And so the class ended in shock and dismay.

* * *

After Professor Dante left the Lecture Hall, once the class had ended,
Elise circled around the other students, striking up conversation.

“How was class today?”

She kept asking such questions, wanting to explain things to Gray.
The first student to be asked was Louise.

“Huh? What?”
“How was the professor’s class? I’m not great with Illusion Magic.”

Her lips began to tremble, then shifted into a bitter smile.
All her resentment had simply vanished.

Louise answered with something like a sigh.

“It was… the best.”

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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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