Surviving the Assassin Academy as a Genius Professor - Chapter 41

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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 41
EP14 – A Small Error Space (2)

“…What is that thing?”

The question came from Rebecca.

At roughly four thousand meters altitude, something had appeared—an eyesore three times the size of the sun or moon as it hung there in the sky.
It looked like an elongated black stone that had torn roughly halfway through the void and emerged on the other side.
Yet it hovered there, preserved in place, giving off an uncanny feeling.

“Hehe… I haven’t the faintest idea!”
“Hmm, I’m lost too. Balmung?”
“…No idea.”

Kendraike, Elise, and Balmung all shook their heads.
Kendraike did the same.
And so, naturally, everyone’s eyes converged on Kaiser.
How the hell am I supposed to know that? he thought irritably, even as he voiced what came to mind.

“…Looks like a Totem.”

A Totem?
At that, they all turned their gazes back to the window.

Indeed, now that he’d said it, it did look like a Totem.
A Supernatural Entity that occupied a territory and displayed overwhelming power within it.
Conversely, it had the drawback of being unable to move once it was anchored in place.

“But if it’s a Totem, it should be activated somehow. This doesn’t feel active at all.”

Something was wrong.
Unlike other Supernatural Entities, Totem-class ones suffered severe magical leakage. This thing gave off no magical presence whatsoever.

“And it’s floating in the air? It’s common knowledge that a Totem has to be anchored to the ground.”

That too was strange.
A Totem fixed in midair? No Grandmaster in existence could do such a thing.

“Is it? A Totem?”
“Are you certain?”

And so Kaiser found himself on the receiving end of everyone’s skeptical stares once more.

He wanted to say: What do you want from me? Am I some god you press a button and get answers from? Why the hell are you always so demanding with me specifically? But he couldn’t say that out loud. Instead, he expressed his stance through a grave expression and by suspiciously stroking his chin.

“You mean the traitors’ information, Your Highness?”

“Tch. Those bastards….”
“War, then?”
“Hard to say. Neither nation wants that scale of conflict, so it’ll be an Assassination Battle at most.”
“Oh no… If that’s the case, then our Assassination Studies Department… Are we preparing a response…?!”
“The department head and anyone with a need to know are already aware. We’re preparing our response, of course.”

Rebecca’s gaze found the monstrosity hanging in the air.

“But that’s not it….”

There was no such weapon among Croitz’s arsenal.
She could be certain of that. Such a thing did not exist.

Which meant that right now, something entirely unrelated to this crisis was targeting Hiaka Academy.

Something the royal intelligence network didn’t know. Something the Academy’s intelligence network didn’t know. Something all the trustworthy informants were ignorant of. Something money and power could not buy information about…….
Rebecca’s smooth brow creased.

“……How interesting.”

It was then that sharp-eyed Balmung spotted something.

“Ah, an airship.”

An airship?
Indeed. Looking more carefully, an airship was flying away. Likely a research vessel carrying the professors.
There was nothing particularly meaningful in that discovery. The very presence of the monstrosity was too intense for that sight alone to settle anything.
Zone 0 was in chaos. The professors. The graduate scholars.
Naturally the cadets as well, and Assassin Town was flooded in real time with posts mingling confusion and concern.

“……For now, go inside and rest. We’ll move while keeping watch on their departure.”
“Yes.”
“Understood.”
“Raime, you go rest too.”
“I will remain at the Princess’s side.”

And yet.
There was one member not present.
Rebecca asked Kaiser.

“Isn’t Grey supposed to be discharged today?”
“……Yes.”
“Why hasn’t she come? Where is she?”
“…….”

Kaiser paused to think.

Grey had been throwing herself at Illusion Magic training with manic intensity. It was so severe that she was practicing three times more than usual, and eventually when Overload struck her down, she collapsed with nosebleeds streaming from her face, yet still pushed to continue.

She’d clashed with Kaiser a couple of times. As the graduate scholar team leader, he’d been watching because the training was simply excessive.
When Kaiser asked then—you’re already surpassing Professor Dante, so why do you train so hard?—Grey laughed briefly, and then her expression hardened.
Even her already-recessed front teeth seemed to shrink further.

—…….

Kaiser, normally sensitive to others’ emotions, could not decipher that look at all.
Soon after, she laughed with “because I’m better, so I need to widen the gap, idiot.” But what chemical reaction was happening inside that grey-haired girl’s head, he couldn’t say.

Thus Grey repeated overexertion until her immunity dropped, and she suffered a vicious bout of influenza in early winter, but even in the midst of that she continued training until finally she collapsed from excessive blood loss, was hospitalized, and put on intravenous fluids.

This morning was supposed to be her discharge day.
But she hadn’t come back.

“……I’ll check on it.”

Kaiser reached out to Grey using the Crystal Orb.
But Grey didn’t answer.

“…Damn it. Why won’t she pick up?”

* * *

“That… if that’s just a hand, how massive is the actual body?”
“Is it a monster? But what kind of monster is this…? Professor Toei. Do you happen to know anything about it?”
“No. I’ve walked into dungeons like it was nothing, but I’ve never seen a specimen like this before. In the first place, monsters simply can’t grow this large unless they’re something like a dragon….”

While the professors huddled together, trying to make sense of the situation.
I fell into thought alone.
There were several things I needed to consider.

First.

‘This Error Space is roughly fifty meters in diameter….’

Yet the Error Space on Byeolmatai Mountain had a diameter of one thousand meters.
Even this Error Space hanging above us now was presenting an overwhelmingly formidable threat, and Byeolmatai Mountain was an Error Space twenty times larger still.
Whether size correlated directly with danger was unclear, but there was no denying that larger meant more unsettling.

‘What in the world is in that place? And why is Eve there?’

I had no answers.

Second.
So how should I make sense of this situation?

‘……It’s not as bad as it could be.’

Error wasn’t inherently catastrophic.
Take that creature, Jinxite — it was originally summoned concealed by a Concealment Curse.
But now its form was revealed, as if caught by Discernment or Detection magic.

‘If it had been summoned while still hidden, the academy might have been annihilated.’

In other words, we had time to prepare.

“Why not simply try attacking it?”

At that, Leo practically leaped out of his seat at Viper’s suggestion.

“Professor Viper. Have you lost your mind? Attack it without even knowing what it is?”
“Well. We have two senior professors here. I don’t get the sense we’d lose, whatever it is.”
“Absolutely not! That’s reckless speculation.”

The two senior professors wore expressions of equal caution.

“I believe we should deliberate further, in my view.”

While Collider mediated, Leo turned to me with a question.

“Professor Dante, what do you think? Do you sense anything? No matter how hard I try to feel something out, I get nothing.”

Living as a person of concern meant living as someone whose every word drew the gaze of all present.
The senior professors, Viper, and even Collider turned to look at me.

“…….”

I hesitated, then decided to be honest.

“…That is a Totem-class monster.”

The moment I spoke with certainty, the chief professor questioned me.

“An individual you know of?”
“I’ve seen it once, long ago. It has no proper body to speak of—just eighty-seven arms dangling from a head.”

The chief professors exchanged puzzled glances.
They appeared to be in their thirties or forties, yet were actually in their seventies or eighties.
In all their decades wandering dungeons, they had never encountered what I claimed to have seen.

“Each of the eighty-seven arms wields a different curse. Until all are fully summoned, it does not attack first.”
“You’re certain of that?”
“Yes.”
“If what you say is true, then—is it possible to stop that thing here?”
“Well… I wouldn’t recommend us throwing ourselves at it here, just the two of us.”

I ran the numbers in my head.
Three arms were currently manifested.
We could sever three of Jinxite’s arms.
The chief professors were monsters, after all.
But there was a real chance neither of us would walk away unharmed.

‘I need to keep both of them alive.’

The Assassination Studies Department had eight chief professors.
Three neutralists had turned traitor.
Five remained.
If I lost two more here, the internal collapse when Croitz and the Assassination Battle erupted would be catastrophic.

“Wouldn’t it be better to sever those three arms while they’re out?”
“Until the Curse activates, there’s no way to know which arm wields which curse. If it’s a low-tier curse, you’ll tear it to shreds without issue. But if we’re unlucky enough to hit one carrying a curse in the nineties, even you couldn’t guarantee survival.”
“Curse in the nineties…! It reaches that level of power?”

The chief professors’ expressions darkened.
That was right. One of Jinxite’s eighty-seven arms bore a curse in the nineties.
And with low probability, one might carry the ninety-six—the Instant Death Curse. True to its name, it ceases the life of whoever it strikes, instantly and absolutely.

“Still, in the end, doing preliminary damage now is the best way to minimize casualties.”
“For now, yes. Severing three arms cuts its firepower in half.”
“Capturing it now would be efficient, but whoever strikes first risks death…”

The chief professor laughed quietly.
It was the assassin’s fate, after all.

An assassin is a kind of missile. They pour everything into a brief strike, killing the target.
No one expects the missile to remain intact after detonation. Yet that they had survived into their seventies and eighties—they knew this was, in the end, simply luck.

“What I would recommend is to withdraw, prepare, identify the curses, and then engage in battle.”
“But won’t the arms multiply if we buy time?”
“Yes.”
“…And a monster of that caliber won’t draw out its Curse for prey. A tiger must enter the fray for it to show its fangs in earnest…”

The chief professor grasped the situation quickly.

“First, let’s discuss this. Everyone, gather here.”

The tactical meeting commenced once again. As before, Leo opposed the plan while Viper pushed for a direct assault.
Viper’s opinion carried the day.

“I can’t sit idle watching an unknown enemy hiding within the academy grounds and pretend my life doesn’t matter.”

I wasn’t entirely satisfied, but it wasn’t a terrible direction either.
Eventually, we’d have to fight anyway.

“If that’s settled, I’ll deploy the Totem and we begin immediately.”
“Understood. We’ll activate Overload. Make sure all the professors have their Parachute Mado Devices equipped beforehand.”

I checked my own mado device and drew out the Liberator+.

Crack! Whoosh—

Soon after, a colossal surge of magical power erupted, and a tempest swept in.
Senior Professor Toei’s Totem revealed itself.
Rumble, rumble, rumble….
A fluorescent monolith thrust up from the center of the deck.

The Firefly Sanctuary.

A Totem-class entity of the highest tier, reaching Level 8.
Within its domain, all allied forces could cast Blink and Void Step multiple times in rapid succession. Through this ability, Senior Professor Toei had once led a squad of five assassins to eliminate fifty-two Croitz assassins in just two minutes and returned without a scratch.

“One hundred and eighty seconds until full Totem deployment!”

That was when an odd script suddenly caught my eye.

【 Grey: ‘Hmm…. Why is everything swaying…?’ 】

What?
Why is Grey’s script appearing here?

“Everyone, prepare yourselves! We engage in combat in one hundred seventy seconds—!”
“Yes! Deploying communications!”

The countdown ticked down.

【 Grey: ‘Why’s everything tilting like this… makes me dizzy….’ 】

Hold on.
What about her?
She shouldn’t be anywhere near here.
The reason we’re all equipped with Parachute Mado Devices is because the airship could crash.

【 Grey: ‘Damn… did I drink too much? Why am I swaying like this….’ 】

I spun around urgently, and Leo shouted after me.

“Professor Dante? Where are you going!”
“I need to check something below deck—I’ll be right back!”

As I stepped inside, the captain blinked at me.

“What are you looking for, Professor?”
“Where could someone have gotten aboard?”
“The airship is designated for rescue operations, so besides here and the deck, there’s really nowhere else… Oh, though there is the engine room.”

The engine room?
Nothing like the roaring machinery of the world outside.
An airship’s engine, naturally, runs on Floating Stones—warm and suffused with a gentle, pleasant energy.

I hurried toward the engine room and threw the door open.
When I switched on the light, I saw her.
Grey hair.

“…Ah, you startled me.”

Grey spoke, clutching a blanket around herself.

“What is it, all of a sudden…?”

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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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