The Academy’s Weapon Replicator - Chapter 157

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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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The Academy’s Weapon Duplicator Chapter 157
Section 52: The Workshop (2)
I sent Selena back first.
Since I’d made it through Weaving, it wouldn’t be visible to her eyes, but if I lingered here, she’d naturally find it strange.
Waving my hands and feet around in an empty lot like that.
After Selena left, I wandered slowly through the workshop alone, taking my time so it would look like a stroll if anyone happened to be watching.
“……Found it.”
And I discovered it—an entrance leading downward.
It appeared like an ordinary section of floor, but the blueprint of the workshop that Weaving revealed showed me there was a passage below this spot.
But.
“I can’t go in right now.”
The entrance was obvious, but I couldn’t descend beneath it.
Because Weaving is an illusion.
No matter what lay below, this workshop—which can’t interfere with reality—couldn’t possibly have been carved through the actual ground beneath. So even if I opened the entrance here, all I’d be doing is tapping on real soil.
‘To go in, I’d either need to use Menosorpo to weave the workshop suspended in midair, or use Heukcheon to forcibly dig out the underground.’
Both would draw tremendous attention. The former would leave a floating structure visible in the sky, and the latter would make an enormous noise when excavating. Traces would remain even after dissolving the Weaving.
‘Either way, I’d need to do it somewhere no one’s watching. For example.’
For example.
……That cottage I’d visited before.
I’d already been thinking about using the cottage for a while now.
Even without the workshop specifically, I needed to keep developing abilities no one knew about, which meant multiple experiments and attempts were necessary.
Until now I’d done them in my room or inside Constellation Academy’s private training chambers, but I was starting to hit walls there.
If I remodeled the cottage to my liking and used it for experiments and training, then summoned the workshop beside it whenever needed, I could complete my own base of operations.
‘The problem is distance.’
Just getting from the residence to the cottage takes considerable time, so if I needed to visit the workshop frequently, I’d have to cut that time down.
I already knew the method. It came to mind the moment I thought of it.
I just don’t know how to do it yet.
‘Portal.’
Indus could use portals to travel to locations they’d set beforehand. But it was one-way—only returning to their base.
Still, that would be enough for now. If I set the cottage as my base and designated it as the portal’s destination, I could return to it whenever I needed. That would greatly improve convenience.
‘……Come to think of it, everyone in Indus could use portals.’
Is portal really that difficult a technique?
I mean, Thomson and Skyler weren’t mages, and they didn’t seem particularly brilliant either.
So why could the entire leadership of Indus, including people like them, use portals?
“Well, the answer’s simple.”
Just ask.
‘That fellow who still has plenty of uses left.’

* * *
Several days later, at Obsidian.
Director Esther had heard an absurd piece of news since the afternoon.
“……He came here? Frontdier de Roach?”
-You know the kid, Director? Showed up without even asking to see you. Said that if he gives his name, you’d know who he is. Can you believe that?
Believe it? I do.
Esther felt a throb of annoyance from the voice on the other end of the line.
Frontdier de Roach. At first, he’d been a student she’d tried to gather information from while investigating Renzo’s death. But not only had Renzo’s circumstances eluded her—she still didn’t even know Frontdier’s true identity.
And on top of that, the very Renzo who was supposed to be dead hadn’t actually died at all and was probably wandering somewhere on the continent without a care in the world right now! She had no business with Frontdier anymore!
-What should we do? Throw him out?
“No, wait. What’s his business?”
-A visitation, he says.
“Whose visitation?”
-That, uh, someone named Kian—you know, that fellow we arrested recently?
Ah.
Has that bastard lost his mind?
-I naturally said it wasn’t possible, but he started insisting that you, Director, would understand, so—
“……Sigh. Fine, send him to my office.”
-Sir? Are you sure you want to allow this?
“Yeah. Besides, I have business with him too.”
-Very well. Understood.
The call ended.
A sigh escaped before I could help it—one I’d been deliberately suppressing while inside the prison.
I’d never hated dealing with people more than I did right now.
Esther, who tracked down and arrested criminals, always held the upper hand in interrogations—whether the subject was human or monster. She pierced through their defenses, saw through their identities, and extracted their guilt.
But facing Frontdier inverted that position entirely. He remained utterly impenetrable, and worse, he seemed to see straight through her.
I rested my chin on my hand and glanced absently to the side, my eyes drifting toward the full-length mirror positioned there.
“……Should I leave this to my doppelgänger?”
The reflection tilted her head with a questioning look. Of course, I hadn’t done it myself—that was the autonomous movement of my reflection alone.
As if asking: shall I help?
“No, I can’t summon a doppelgänger for something like this.”
I shook my head.
True, the doppelgänger operated at my level of capability—strange as it was to describe a person in terms of “performance.” In reality, my duplicate’s abilities were no different from my own. The only thing it couldn’t do was invoke Divine Punishment.
But there was another, deeper reason I couldn’t use my doppelgänger carelessly: it was simply too much like the original.
‘In this world, I am Esther.’
I knew instinctively what my duplicate would think. How could I not? It was me, after all. My doppelgänger had the potential to become the true self at any moment.
Certainly, because it carried my own values, it wouldn’t automatically become my enemy or seize any chance to kill me.
But if the original—myself—were ever judged as irrational in this world, if I reached a “rational decision” that I couldn’t pass divine judgment on the guilty, then—
my doppelgänger would eliminate me without hesitation. All the more efficiently, all the more swiftly, to dispatch more criminals.
Knock, knock.
“Director, I’ve brought them in.”
While I was lost in thought, a knock sounded at the door.
“Come in.”
As I spoke, the door opened. A prison guard entered, followed by Frontdier.
That cheerful smile of his irritated me for reasons I couldn’t quite name.
“Right. Good work.”
The guard saluted sharply and left. Frontdier, remaining behind, walked briskly over and settled onto the nearby sofa.
“……I didn’t tell you to sit.”
“You were going to anyway, weren’t you?”
Sharp as my gaze was, directed at Frontdier’s casual tone, his expression never wavered.
He’d been like this from the very first meeting.
I found his behavior deeply strange—not in the way of someone who mocked me or underestimated me.
Rather, it was as though he’d met an old friend. As if he believed, without a shred of doubt, that I was on his side.
Of course, since I’d first seen Frontdier at Heldrey’s residence, his reaction made no sense to me.
“You want to see Kian?”
“Yes. I don’t need the others. Just Kian.”
Other members or not, Kian himself was impossible to meet right now.
I pressed my fingers to the bridge of my nose.
Currently, the leadership of Indus was forbidden from seeing anyone.
Indus couldn’t track every low-level member under them, so there was a risk of visitors posing as family—parents, siblings, relatives—passing coded instructions for new operations. Hence the visiting ban.
And ever since that monster stole Renzo’s corpse and fled, the restrictions on visits had become even more severe.
‘……Wait.’
Then something clicked. I looked at Frontdier more carefully.
“Just now—you said Kian was enough?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Not just any one of the other Indus members. Specifically Kian alone?”
“Yes.”
Frontdier’s expression remained bright and open.
But my eyes sharpened, seeing past that smile.
‘Could he already know?’
Among Indus’s leadership, Kian had a remarkably clean criminal record.
Living within Indus, which dreamed of revolution, made it nearly impossible to avoid crime—large or small. For leadership, it was all but inevitable.
Yet while every other member was entangled in serious crimes—murder, assault—Kian had no such stain.
Even accounting for his youth, his connections to Indus had been cleanly severed from the records themselves.
‘Heldrey’s doing, no doubt.’
The rumor that Heldrey doted on his granddaughter turned out to be true. While Kian’s own abstinence from crime may have played a part, the fact that she’d been completely erased from Indus’s files made me shake my head in disbelief.
Precisely because of this, Kian could be granted a conditional visit—though the outside world didn’t know. Under my discretion as director, I’d been planning to call in whoever I deemed appropriate to meet.
‘Just how much does he know?’
When we’d met at the residence, Frontdier claimed he’d orchestrated my visit there.
I still half-doubted that, but one thing was certain: Frontdier knew more than most.
Perhaps he possessed something that transcended even my strongest suit—that keen insight and deductive power—
“A full-length mirror.”
As if cutting off Esther’s train of thought.
Frontdier’s loaded remark, the timing far too convenient to be mere chance.
“A full-length mirror that shows everything from head to foot like that—they’re rare, aren’t they?”
“…You.”
“I was curious about it.”
Frontdier said this with a laugh.
Esther looked at the mirror. Of course, the figure reflected there was her own image. A doppelgänger would not appear in the mirror unless she willed it.
…There shouldn’t be anything strange about the reflection itself.
So why was Frontdier bringing up the mirror now?
Was it really just because he found it curious? Could this too be mere coincidence?
“…If you wish to see a visitor.”
Esther shook her head.
She had business of her own with Frontdier. It was for that reason she’d summoned him to her office.
“Answer my question first.”
“What is it?”
When Frontdier asked back, Esther took a moment to organize her thoughts.
Frontdier had left the Residence for Constellation first, and during his absence, she’d reached a conclusion after much deliberation and consideration.
“That necklace of yours.”
Esther’s gaze fell upon Frontdier’s necklace.
A neat pendant, set with a black jewel.
‘I heard that Frontdier created weapons from nothing.’
And not limited to a single kind—weapons of all sorts.
According to the information from witnesses she’d recently investigated, that method was likely connected to this very necklace.
“What’s inside that necklace—is it a dark water of some kind?”
“…”
Frontdier’s usual quick and decisive reply finally faltered.
For the first time before Esther’s eyes, Frontdier appeared genuinely startled.
At least, that’s how it seemed to her. That’s how she wanted to believe it.
Sensing she’d cornered Frontdier, Esther pressed further.
“The black lake said to sleep within the glacier beyond the North. Is it Hel’s Fragment?”
This time it was unmistakable. Frontdier’s pupils dilated visibly, his gaze wavering.
Frontdier was shocked.
Genuinely shocked.
Esther continued speaking.
“According to ancient legend, Hel’s Fragment was situated at the northwestern terminus—the last point where Hel lingered in reality before it was severed from the world after Ragnarok came to pass. Located directly above Yeranheś, which your House rules. You brought it from there, didn’t you?”
“…”
“Answer me! Frontdier!”
Esther’s voice rang out sharply, but Frontdier remained silent still.
Now he was seized by emotions too complex to name.
But he would set those aside for now.
For the moment, Frontdier felt grateful to Esther.

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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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