Surviving the Assassin Academy as a Genius Professor - Chapter 51

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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 51
DLC [The Instructor’s Hero’s Journey]: Hotfix Ver 2.3.1a(2)

“What’s become of me in reality?”
“…….”

To my question,
Dino shook his head tensely.
He couldn’t say.

“If I die inside the game, do I die for real?”
“…….” A nod.

One thing became clear.
I couldn’t afford to die.

“Why was I summoned here, into this world within the game?”
“…….” Shake shake.

“Can you only answer by shaking your head?”
“…….” Shake shake.

“Then why just nod and shake? You want to die?”
“…….” Shake shake.

“Speak.”
“U-uh, okay.”

I posed the earlier questions again. About me in reality. Death within the game. Why I was summoned. Everything.

“…I-I don’t know.”
“You do, don’t you?”
“…I don’t knoooow!”

But Dino could only squirm in distress.

“If you don’t know, that’s the end of it?”
“Huh?”
“You have to find out.”
“A-ah, I…!”
“Finding out isn’t enough. You have to tell me.”
“Stop tormenting me…! I can’t tell you…!”
“You’re my assistant. It’s your role to help. Yet when I ask for your help, you say nothing—how is that different from not knowing at all? Useless wretch. Parasite.”
“Stop it…! E-even if you torment me like this, I won’t tell…!”

Pressure alone wouldn’t work.
It was, most likely, a system-level Seal.

“Then, am I the only player in this world?”
“Yes! It’s a Single Game, so… in your world, only you are the player.”

In my world, I alone am the player.
The weight those words carried felt remarkably loaded—was that my interpretation reading too much into it?

“Then….”

I paused for a moment, then began to trace the logic forward.

“From what I gather, that sounds like everyone has their own world, different from everyone else’s.”
“Yeah, more or less. And everyone’s world is slightly different.”

In other words, it’s like a sandbox game.
Intriguing words, and strange ones at that.

“Oh, that’s right.”

Dino clapped his stubby little dinosaur arms together.

“Now that I think about it, there are people waiting for you…!”
“People waiting for me?”
“Uh-huh. So many! Like, this many, and this many, and this many~~~!”

He spread his short arms wide, trying to make his point.
By arm’s length alone, it looked like only one or two people.
But there were apparently more than that.

“Who are they?”
“Other players like you…! And, you’re actually very famous among them…!”
“Why would I be.”
“Well, because you’re playing on Hell Difficulty…!”

I couldn’t fathom why that would make me famous.
Dino grinned and said something that hit me like a sucker punch.

“…and you’re the only one alive!”

Ah, I see.

I finally understood something. This really did seem similar to a single-player game in the real world.
But even if you play a game alone, you can still communicate with other gamers through communities and forums, right?
The people waiting for me that Dino mentioned appeared to be from that community.

“So, are all the other Hell Difficulty players dead?”
“Uh-huh.”

When I thought about it, of course they would be.
How many assassination attempts had there been on my first day of employment?
There were too many situations where I could’ve died to count on both hands.
Yet I survived.

Was it because I’m a veteran player? Because I’m skilled and superior?
Only half right.
The other half was pure luck.
Bugs mattered. Exploits mattered. Desperate acting mattered. Understanding the game mattered. But without luck, I would’ve died. I knew that all too well.

“…But if everyone has their own world anyway, what’s the point of me being Hell Difficulty?”
“Well, see? Later there’s going to be DLC with multiplayer multiplayer multiplayer multiplayer multiplayer multiplayerrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiii……………………………………………………………………”

Startling. His words stretched out as if lagging, and then a blue status window locked over Dino’s mouth.

「 ⧉ 」

At the same moment, focus drained from his eyes.
A Seal, as I thought.
The Sacred Mark of Systematicity had sealed his mouth shut.

What had he been about to say?
DLC with multiplayer…? Really?
DLC, after all, is an element that can be added at any time.
Perhaps a multiplayer server will emerge in the future.
A place where single-player gamers could gather together.

‘I see the general idea, then.’

That explained why I’d become so famous among them.
Hard Difficulty had far more generous rewards and a vastly expanded game scale compared to Normal Difficulty.
To kill overwhelmingly powerful enemies, you had to become overwhelmingly powerful yourself.

It wasn’t just numbers inflated for their own sake.
The actual scope of the game had changed.

Take dungeons, for instance—the ones that had three basement floors
expanded to five basement floors.

Hell Difficulty would be the same way, I imagined.
At a point where barely one main story playthrough was underway, a Legendary II-grade weapon had already dropped, and I’d claimed it.
Certainly, the Error Space had helped, and circumstances had aligned favorably, but even so—it was growth that defied sense.
And it would continue that way.
I would grow overwhelmingly stronger than players on other difficulties. As long as I survived.
That hope, it seemed, had taken root in many hearts.

At that moment, focus returned to Dino’s vacant eyes.

“…Right. How far did I get before…?”

Then he asked.

“Anyway, want to go see them? The other players? They’re all waiting for you at the End Ocean!”

Meeting them would be fine.
I had no objection.
But before that, I decided to think through this situation a little more.

First, this game.
Hiaka Academy: Assassination Studies Course was
actually released as part of a trilogy along with Warrior Studies Course and Magic Studies Course.

The Warrior class came first, then Magic, then Assassin.
I’d tried all three, but because the Assassin was the most fun, I’d focused exclusively on the Assassination Studies Course.

The game was developed overseas.
Poland, maybe Finland….
Some Nordic country, anyway. Somewhere in Europe.

The game system was complex enough to create a high barrier to entry.
Overseas, it had developed a cult following among enthusiasts, but in Korea it barely made a ripple.
So when I needed to use a community, I had to rely on overseas forums.

“Dino. How many people have died on Hell Difficulty?”
“Uh, a ton.”
“Roughly how many. Hundreds?”
“More than that.”

The kid looked upward with a soft exhale.
This time, no Seal activated.

“More than hundreds, so….”

What became of them, I couldn’t say.
Only that they were dead.

“Did many players from other difficulty levels survive?”
“Yeah.”
“You mentioned the End Ocean before—where is that?”
“It’s a sea that only people who’ve seen the game’s ending can reach.”

Those who’d seen the ending of the Single Game could access the community from that final point, or so it seemed.

“I haven’t seen the ending yet.”
“Right! So you won’t be able to go too deep. It’s incredibly rare for someone to end up Offline without having seen the ending first.”

I see.
Still hazy, but I was beginning to grasp it.
As we talked a bit more, I found myself drawing a forest in my mind.
This world was divided into several dimensions.

1. The world inside the Single Game: the Overworld
2. The world outside the game: Offline
3. The community of users who’ve seen the ending: End Ocean

The Overworld was the world I’d just come from.
That address that came to mind when I logged in——was the coordinates of my world.

Offline was this white world beneath my feet right now. The space where you’re banished when you’ve seen the ending or during a hotfix.

And Dino was now urging me to go to the End Ocean.
Other players from different difficulty levels who’d seen the game’s ending were waiting for me there, he said.

I glanced at the timer and made up my mind.

“All right. Let’s go then—to this End Ocean.”
“Yeah! Jump!”

Jump?

Dino drew close and bent down.
The back of his gray dinosaur costume exposed.
Jump on this little guy’s back?

“You’ve got to pilot it well.”

And true enough, there was an elongated button protruding from the back of Dino’s dinosaur head.

[ JUMP ]

A gray dinosaur. A white world. A Jump button.
I’ve seen this somewhere before, haven’t I……

In any case.
The moment I climbed onto the dinosaur costume, I found myself shrinking, and Dino and I seemed to fuse together seamlessly.

“Let’s go! We need to break past ten thousand points!”
“Understood.”

Dino began to run.
Clop-clop.
Surprisingly, there was no hesitation.

⋮

The score floating above my head began to climb.
I had to break ten thousand points. I’d wondered what that meant, but it seemed that was the score in question.

However.
The moment I started moving while riding on Dino’s back,
unlike when I walked alone, the world began to shift rapidly around me.
Cacti appeared. The sky’s landscape changed.
Dino wasn’t running through the Offline.
He was seeping into the Error Space itself.

⋮

The rhythm that followed felt familiar somehow.

As Dino began running faster and faster,
a cactus appeared.
I mashed the Jump button.
Bonk!

“Ow!”
“What the—”
“Press gently on the button…!”

This was ridiculous.
Who puts a button on someone’s head?
But it hurt, so I decided to press it more gently.
Bonk. Bonk.

“Ow! Ow! It hurts…!”

But what would happen if I kept pressing gently?
I decided to try pressing even softer.

“It hurts! Press gently, please!!”

I gave up trying.

Bonk! Bonk!

“Ahhh!”

⋮

So when I pressed Jump continuously, this time a pterosaur-like creature came flying, and when I didn’t press Jump, it swept over me above.
This too was a familiar pattern.

Then at some point, the pterosaur began flying at a remarkably awkward altitude.

“What do we do?”
“It’s fine. I think we can dodge it.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll trust you.”

The pterosaur embedded itself in my forehead.
Ah, dammit. That scared me.

When I opened my eyes, the cactus and pterosaur had both vanished.
Dino was frowning with unmistakable disappointment.

“What are you doing? It’s an easy section that’s only worth 512 points.”
“You said you could definitely dodge it!”
“When did I say that?”
…….

He tilted his head as if he genuinely had no idea.
Look at this guy. Now that we’re getting a little closer, his shamelessness is really showing through.
But for some reason, arguing with a kid felt beneath me, so… I just decided to keep my mouth shut.

“Let’s try again. Do better this time.”

Still, I’d already figured it out from the first attempt.
I got the gist of it. The difficulty level of this game.

⋮

It was so tedious I wanted to die.

Dino kept getting faster.
Night fell along the path we were running.
The subtle tricks of the cacti and pterosaurs continued relentlessly, but—
Tap! Tap!

“Hah! Hah!”

I hammered the buttons hard and leaped over everything in an instant. It seemed like I heard Dino saying something here and there, something about being gentle, but the wind was too strong to make it out.

Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap!!

“Argh!!”

At last, we arrived.
Dino, who’d been touching the back of his head, broke into a wide grin.

“But you’re good. Making it in just two tries—that’s a first!”

He did not say: You said I was the first person you ever met, didn’t you?
Instead, he turned his gaze toward the distance.

To the far edge of the white world.
A sea stretched out before him.
So this is where the End Ocean begins.
Within it, there are so many people waiting for me……?

* * *

Ting …

Ting …

Ting ….

Something fell to the ground.

…Thunk.

Focus returned to her vacant blue eyes. Eve reached out and caught what had fallen.

The thing that had been rattling fell, yet for some reason, it would not reattach to her body.

No matter what she tried.
It would not stick.

After that, the bell rang no more. However much she shook it. When she tapped its surface, only a dull sound came forth.

“…….”

Eve turned her head and gazed toward the distance.
Blankly, for a very long time.

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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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