Surviving the Assassin Academy as a Genius Professor - Chapter 67

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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 67
EP18 – Over the Snowy Ruins, the Christmas Bell Rings (12)

This was as far as I could take it. The Final Exam I’d prepared.

Fortunately, it had concluded without a hitch. The cadets were all pouring their intense thoughts into the Script.

Honestly, it had been exhausting. Expensive too. Still, Grey had really come through with that nine-hundred-point margin, so at least I’d gotten my money’s worth in recovery potions.

In any case, from here on out it was out of my hands. I’d barely slept during all this, so my plan was to return to the manor and collapse into bed the moment I could.

With that thought in mind, I was just turning to offer a light bow to the professors who’d assisted me.

Then I felt something strange. Something descended from the sky and touched the crown of my head. A touch impossibly soft and warm.
At first, I thought it was the effect of the Illusion Magic I’d created. I’d woven a restful, comforting energy into the light to help people feel at ease.

But it wasn’t. This sensation was qualitatively different—operating on an entirely different plane.

For a moment, I felt as though I were cradled in my mother’s arms.

Not my own mother… but the very concept of “mother”—the idea itself that a person could find shelter in peace—had become a force, and it was touching me.

Bewildered, I looked up at the sky.
And I saw something that took my breath away.

The thread of energy touching my crown extended upward, all the way to the heavens themselves, where it connected to a single star brightening the night sky.

Goosebumps spread across my skin.

The star was responding to me. Normally, this was an event that wouldn’t occur until Story Chapter 4 or 5.
Yet here I was, barely in the transition between Acts 1 and 2, and the star was watching me.

┃ Gift [Peace Star☮]
┃ Reward: Star Fragment × 100

This couldn’t be real.
I marveled internally. A hundred Star Fragments, all at once?
Rewards given directly by a star truly were of a different caliber.

Sacred Mark!
This was a gift even greater than the first, because the Peace Star☮ was a being that despised humans and rarely exercised its divine authority or bestowed blessings upon them.
Yet a Sacred Mark was divine power—it could cure poison with plain water, slay tigers with straw, mold humans from clay.
With the Peace Star☮’s Great Recovery, the healing effects would be beyond imagination.

The next instant, something soft touched my cheek.

Startled, I turned my head.
What touched my cheek also touched my lips.

Ah, sorry.

* * *

“Professor Dante! What is this?”

Galois, the senior professor, was the first to sense the Sacred Mark. He flew to my side with a Blink, unable to contain his excitement as he shouted—what on earth was happening?

“It’s a Sacred Mark. From Peace Star.”
“What? Peace Star bestowed a Sacred Mark? But how—how could that temperament-ridden human-hater possibly give a Sacred Mark here for?”

He should watch his tongue.
The spirit was still right beside me, after all.

Sure enough, the creature began to rage.
Peace Star always traveled as three—each representing inner peace, relational peace, and world peace. They couldn’t achieve harmony without all three present.
Moreover, despite bearing the name of peace, the spirit was ironically one of the angriest stars of all.

Just look at this.
Even now it was fuming in emotional gradations to itself—’Here I was trying to be nice, and you curse me to my face? Now that I think about it, that’s messed up?’ That sort of thing.

This won’t do.
If I leave it alone, it might revoke the Sacred Mark entirely.

“…Senior, I’m terribly sorry, but having received the Sacred Mark, I cannot agree with you.”
“What?”
“I believe Peace Star to be a benevolent spirit. It’s humanity alone that shatters that peace, isn’t it?”

I decided to earn some points while I was at it.
Glancing subtly toward the empty air.

【 Senior Professor Galois : ‘Hmm…?’ 】
【 Senior Professor Galois : ‘Ah!’ 】
【 Senior Professor Galois : ‘So it’s still here.’ 】

At that, the quick-witted Professor Galois nodded his head.

“Well… now that you mention it, you’re right. Destroying peace has been humanity’s chronic problem since prehistoric times.”
“Indeed.”
“Actually, I hate humans too!”
“Pardon?”
“I’ve hated them since ancient times! Monsters in the guise of progress, destroying the world! No other creature on this earth is as depraved as humans! They should all be ground down into meat scraps!”
“Senior, that’s a bit—”
“Silence!! If you’re human, live with a grateful heart! Humans are trash!!”

A torrent of misanthropy unleashed in an instant.
Ah.
So this is Senior Galois.
The monster of elite social grace—plagiarizing papers, yet overcoming that reputation through sheer sophistry!
I gazed upon him with pure admiration.
And the response was?

Perfection!
Absolutely, utterly delightful, wouldn’t you say?

“But setting aside what this star is or isn’t, why on earth has it suddenly appeared here…… Could it be because of that?”
“Yes. I believe that to be the case.”

Galois and I lifted our heads, gazing up at the Christmas Tree.

“The Sacred Mark is Great Recovery, then….”
“It appears to activate wherever the bell’s sound reaches.”
“How far does it carry? The sound isn’t particularly loud from here. Did you perhaps wire in a Distance Balance circuit as well?”
“Yes. It will ring softly throughout the entire Academy. No matter how far.”

I turned my head, and his gaze followed.
And so we watched.

Dong ─

The bell’s sound reaching even now,

Dong ─

far away, toward Zone 0 and Zone 2.

Dong ─

* * *

The bell tolls.

Dong ─

Over the heads of Elise and Grey, their exam behind them.

Dong ─

Reaching Rebecca too, smoking a cigarette alone in a corner of the Academy Building.

Dong ─

To the ears of Valmond, crouched atop the snowy mountainside.

Dong ─

To Kaiser’s ears as he sat vacant before the grave of a fallen friend.

Dong ─

To Kendrick, locked in the Discipline Office’s cell after his rampage in Zone 0, demanding to leave.

Dong ─

And even to Eve, who sat alone in the cave, clutching at her wounds as sleep claimed her,
who could see nor hear nothing else.

“……?”

Eve’s eyes snapped open. She rose and went outside to listen to the bell.
It was a bell-toll she had never heard before, yet it struck her with the familiarity and warmth of something long cherished.
Eve gazed down at her pale arms, watching as the wounds knitted together as if washed clean. One certainty crystallized within her.

………

‘The human’ was alive.

* * *

The room was dark. Battalion, the senior professor, lay cradling a warm and beautiful body against his chest, luxuriating in hair like clouds.

“How fortunate we are, Glumie.”
………

It was infidelity. He had a wife, and Glumie had a husband, but such things were secondary. There was nothing strange about the intimacy that grew between two who had conspired together in betraying the nation.

The lower-ranked martial artists aged swiftly. It was common enough for aging Rankers to abandon family and lose themselves in one another—it happened here too. One had only to look: men and women here, despite being decades older, possessed bodies in their mid-thirties.
Then a playful question occurred to Battalion.

“Are you… real?”

He thought himself quite witty.

He did not realize how deeply all those who specialized in Illusion Magic despised that particular joke.

………

Glumie rose from the bed and placed a cigarette between her lips. Her warmth toward him had vanished in an instant.

“What are you doing, smoking alone? Give me one too.”
………
“You’re not angry, are you?”
………

She flicked a cigarette at the irritating man, then gazed blankly out the window.

………?

Something strange caught Glumie’s eye.

“What the hell is that…?”
“Hmm? Did you just curse at me?”

Glumie’s face twisted into a knot of fury.

“Come here. Stop your nonsense.”
“…What?”
“Now! This instant!”

Hearing her voice thick with rage for the first time, Battalion felt a flash of humiliation even as he moved to her side.
Within the Mirage she had unfurled, something wrong rippled through the Hiaka Academy.

“What the hell is that…?”

Something that absolutely should not exist in Hiaka.

* * *

After the tree had bloomed. In a single moment, much was overturned. Humans knew it. Animals knew it. Enemies knew it. And not a single spirit could remain ignorant of it.

│▽ㅇ)

This creature was a spirit that savored the sight of people worn down or drowning in sorrow — Yeomtamseong, the spirit of prying observation.

│▽ㅇ) ….

For nearly a month, the spirit had been making the rounds of emotional hotspots, but its mood had begun to sour. It was all because of that thoroughly irritating Christmas Tree.

Ding—

A gentle bell tone rippled through the people. Being crafted of Illusion Magic, it carried no discord, no harshness, no dread—merely a sound that was, quite simply, sublime.
And the spirit despised sublimity, peace, and such things.

│▽ㅇ)

│ㅁㅇ)

│_ㅇ)

This is ruined.

The spirit, having thought as much, turned toward somewhere—toward an emotional hotspot that was especially unique among them. It was a child who rarely cried. All this while, the spirit had been saving this particular hotspot, waiting for the moment it could make the child weep by its own hand.

For a child not to cry when all around were suffering—that was anticipation. The spirit could exert small interference; when the other hotspots had begun to settle, it had been planning merely to stretch out this one emotional peak just a touch longer.

And yet.

That Peace Star—whom the spirit sometimes favored, sometimes despised—seemed to have done something utterly pointless.

“Ugh… what kind of bell sound is this…?”

The child’s father had regained consciousness.

“You… you’re awake!!”
“Huh!?”

The wife and her brother-in-law, who had been quarreling moments before, hurried toward the man and embraced him. Then they began to weep.

The child was there too.
The child who did not cry.

Held in the arms of his awakened father and uncertain what to do with himself, the child waited until the man drifted back to sleep, then bolted from the house. Out into the streets of the Snowy Ruins.

He ran with a bright smile for a long while, but when he glimpsed the enormous Christmas Tree beyond the corner of an alley, he stopped.

The child sank down, dazed. He clasped his hands together and, muttering words of gratitude and thanks and such, began to cry.

The spirit found this strange.

│_ㅇ)a Why is he crying?

Cry, cry—the spirit had yearned for it so desperately, yet the child had not even pretended. But now his father had awakened and everything had resolved itself well, and still the child cried. And more bewildering still: now that he finally wept, why was there no pleasure in it?

After pondering long, the spirit understood. There existed a concept among human emotions that the spirit despised most, that it found most tedious. And that concept dwelt in the faces of every human at Hiaka Academy, and in the face of this child.

Hope.

│_ㅇ)

│ㅇ)

│)

│

EP18

Over the Snowy Ruins, Christmas bells ring out.

END

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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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