The Academy’s Weapon Replicator - Chapter 175

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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 Weapon Replicator of the Academy Chapter 175
Episode 56: Iron Bastion (3)
Black Demons.
Silvain had never fought them before, yet merely their touch had made the monsters outside noticeably stronger. He could easily imagine how formidable the originals themselves must be. If they kept multiplying and caught up to the outer swarm?
If that intelligence proved true.
“Then what in the name of heaven are we supposed to do?”
Was it even possible to hold back such numbers?
With Flying Demons and Black Demons in the mix, and five times their current force bearing down on them—
Against such overwhelming numbers, tactics became meaningless. A few days or months of preparation might change things, but not now.
And yet Frontdier’s face remained serene as he delivered this shocking news. If anything, concern flickered across his features.
He was gauging Silvain’s emotional state—how this news would land on the younger man.
Since when have I grown so weak that a boy like this worries over me? Silvain found the thought bitter.
“Do you have a plan, Frontdier? Some way to break through this deadlock?”
Frontdier nodded gently in response, but that air of quiet certainty struck Silvain as utterly incomprehensible.
“…You have a solution? How?”
“What I propose isn’t so different from what you’ve been doing all along, Commander.”
“What I’ve been doing?”
“Yes—capturing their leader.”
A thin thread of hope kindled in Silvain’s eyes.
That was it. From the moment that vast force began to assemble, he’d known there had to be a commander orchestrating it. And as he’d tracked them back along their approach, he’d received Frontdier’s message: “Ambush alert.” He’d turned back then.
A force that size couldn’t simply change positions without friction. They were still at that Gathering Point.
“They assemble because a commander exists. Whatever means were used, the fact that all those outer monsters move as one will speaks to something controlling them—some entity wielding authority over them. Remove that cause, and the effect crumbles.”
“…If we can destroy it—”
“Then they won’t rally, and however many monsters flood toward the Barrier, we can hold the line. It will demand longer than last winter, but it can be done.”
True. Monsters lacking coordination were work the Roach Knight Order and the soldiers could manage. If they didn’t all come at once, there was a path to victory.
“You know the location? The Gathering Point? What’s causing them to assemble?”
“I do.”
“Excellent. Then I and the Roach Knight Order will head there at first light.”
Silvain’s tone brightened. What had seemed utterly hopeless moments before now appeared manageable—Frontdier held crucial intelligence that could turn the tide.
But Frontdier shook his head.
“You cannot go there, Commander. Nor can the knights.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’ll have noticed. When you and the Order turned back from your approach to the Gathering Point—they saw.”
Ah, Silvain remembered. Cutting off their rear guard, pushing backward up their approach.
“I understand if you doubt my word, but there truly was an ambush lying in wait.”
“…So our movements have already been detected, even if we escaped the trap itself.”
“Yes. Which is why from tomorrow onward, they will launch their full assault—leaving no room for you or the Order to act separately.”
Silvain could not deny it.
The only reason his knights had been able to move independently before was that Angen’s strength and the monsters’ numbers had allowed Silvain to calculate their force level accurately.
But if the enemy numbers were as staggering as Frontdier claimed, the Roach Knight Order would need every ounce of strength just to defend the Barrier. The moment it fell, the Gathering Point and everything else would become irrelevant.
“If you and your knights were assassins trained in concealment, perhaps—but you’re not. You’re the pillars of this Barrier, the iron wall that must never crack.”
“…That’s true.”
They were too valuable to the Barrier’s defense to leave it. Yet to send anyone else would be to send them to certain death at the Gathering Point.
It was then that Silvain understood what Frontdier had been driving toward. Why he’d brought this up in private.
“I must go myself.”
“…!”
Though Silvain had anticipated those words, hearing them spoken aloud made the weight of reality suddenly crushing.
A lazy nobody, they’d called him—yet it seemed Frontdier’s indolence had been something else entirely. The rumors of Frontdier would never produce words like these on their own.
“Are you asking me to help you cross the Barrier?”
“Simply help me avoid detection at my quarters. That will suffice.”
Silvain covered his eyes with his hand. Darkness closed in—both literal and within his heart.
“…No.”
Though Silvain wrestled with the decision, the answer had already been determined.
Silvain knew nothing of Frontdier’s true nature. A man who was neither soldier nor knight, yet alone among all personnel could fight without defending the Barrier. That was all Silvain thought he knew.
He’d assumed Frontdier made this proposal precisely because of that singular position.
If Frontdier went alone to the Gathering Point, countless enemies already lay in wait there. Even if he could resolve the cause of their assembly with ease, they wouldn’t simply let him walk away.
And Frontdier was Angen’s son. The Duke had already made it emphatically clear that Frontdier was not to participate in the Barrier battle. By Silvain’s judgment, while the boy showed talent for combat, he was still green—unblooded against the outer monsters, lacking the tempering for true war.
To send him alone into a massive monster encampment would be madness.
But beyond these small reasons, the greatest was—

“You’re far too young.”
“…….”
However strong Frontdier was, whatever it meant to be the lord’s son—
In Silvain’s eyes, Frontdier was simply too young.
To push an unfinished child toward certain death for the merest thread of hope? No true knight would do such a thing.
“……If we succeed, we can save far more lives.”
“And what does that change?”
Silvain’s voice dropped to a grave depth. He could not let Frontdier’s words pass unheeded.
“One life to save many—that is a calculation only an emperor makes. I did not become a knight to engage in such arithmetic. I did not rise to Commander so that a child would die, so that their lives might rest upon my shoulders.”
Sacrificing the few for the many. Had Silvain been willing to embrace such logic from the start, he would never have become a knight.
“I became a knight to save children like you. And so, I cannot send you.”
“……But many people will die.”
“Then I alone will die.”
Silvain’s eyes kindled with a cold, crystalline light.
“I will cast aside this one life of mine and slaughter every last one of them.”
It was not mere resolve—it was words that carried the weight of life itself. Hearing them, Frontdier closed his eyes for a moment.
So this is how it would go. Silvain possessed a loyalty as a knight that ran too deep.
What frightened him most was that Silvain, Angen, and the Roach Knight Order might truly have the strength to hold the line.
——But they would fall.
To save the citizens’ lives, the Roach Knight Order would scatter their blood across the Barrier.
Angen, too, would likely not emerge unscathed.
‘It is truly difficult.’
Saving people.
The more steadfast a person’s convictions had become, the harder they were to sway.
And so there was no choice.
“Then I have no choice either.”
“Indeed. Thank you for the information. I’ll alert the Order and the lord at once so we can prepare our defenses thoroughly.”
“I’ll simply cross the Barrier on my own.”
Frontdier spoke with a smile as he said it.
At those words, Silvain’s mouth fell open.
“……What did you just……?”
“I’d hoped you would help me slip away unnoticed, Commander. Since you’ve refused, I suppose I’ll have no choice but to leave my quarters regardless, and cross the Barrier whether I’m caught or not.”
“You think I’d stand idly by and watch?”
“You’ll have to, won’t you? You’ll be too busy cutting down Monsters at the Barrier by then.”
Silvain regarded Frontdier, who wore an impudent smile.
Just as Frontdier said, by the time he left his quarters, Silvain would already be at the Barrier. Of course, any such departure would never be permitted, and Silvain himself harbored not the slightest thought of allowing it.
“……Do you truly wish to die that badly, Frontdier?”
Silvain gazed at him, seized by an odd and bewildering emotion.
How could Frontdier smile so easily?
How could he laugh off Silvain’s pleas and venture toward that perilous place beyond the Barrier?
“I won’t die.”
“……!”
Frontdier spoke those words with a small, hidden loneliness concealed within his smile.
“There are too many unfinished tasks waiting for me to die in a place like this.”

* * *
“……Sigh.”
Silvain sat in his private office, lost in thought.
-I am necessary to prevent this crisis.
That was what Frontdier had said. His voice had carried neither confidence nor anxiety—as though he were reciting a passage from some book, flat and affectless.
Though it was unintended, this had lent Frontdier some measure of credibility in Silvain’s eyes,
-But how do you expect to prevent this catastrophe?
-I cannot tell you that.
Because the boy refused to disclose the particulars of his plan, Silvain found a headache brewing of its own accord.
‘Just let him go,’ he says.
At present, Frontdier’s movements were shackled by Angen. Even now, several attendants remained at his quarters under the guise of care, keeping watch over him.
Likely, far more eyes followed him than Frontdier himself realized.
Of course, if Silvain gave the word, Frontdier’s escape would be simple enough. He could relocate the boy’s ‘temporary quarters’ under the pretense of personal training, and the attendants would see Frontdier off without suspicion—it was a Commander’s order, after all.
Yet Silvain could not bring himself to do it. Send that child alone beyond the Barrier? What difference would that make from condemning him to death?
But if he didn’t help, the boy would charge in alone—what a wretched bind. Had he truly gone mad with a death wish?
‘What in the world is he so confident about?’
What Frontdier displayed went beyond mere confidence. It had the cadence of someone declaring, ‘I shall now sit down in this chair.’ Did he even know what he was saying? Even if it didn’t seem so, was this another breed of madness?
But if it wasn’t madness.
If that measured tone had a clear reason behind it.
‘What is he, really?’
It was, when you thought about it, a strange affair.
When Angen had spoken of Frontdier, he’d thought it an extraordinary fate. That the gods themselves might be involved. What would a man have to do to earn the hatred of divinity?
And then there was the Raven. His taming prowess was extraordinary. Sending it out for reconnaissance and reports from afar was one thing, but it spoke fluently and with remarkable intelligence. He’d need to run more tests to know for certain, but at first glance, it was comparable to a human.
In combat training, its instincts weren’t poor either, and beyond that—the Judgment to synthesize information and draw conclusions, the equanimity that followed, and a composure in the face of death so uncanny it bordered on the eerie.
‘…that’s right.’
Thinking it through carefully, memory came back to him. Frontdier had gone to Taeibun over summer break, hadn’t he? He’d heard the boy had even participated in the Barrier fighting there. No matter that it was summer, fighting at the Barrier was a matter of staking one’s life.
To have returned unharmed from such a place—he must have shown something.
Silvain took out his phone. He called an old colleague.
‘Has he gone back to the capital?’
It felt like just yesterday they’d been boasting about their respective knight orders to each other.
-…Hello? Silvain?
Soon, a familiar voice came through the receiver.
“Sanders.”
The one Silvain had called was Sanders.
Commander of the Shraus Knight Order, Sanders—the very man who had taken temporary command of the knights there when Frontdier had set out for Taeibun.
-What’s going on? It’s been a while.
“How’ve you been?”
The two exchanged brief updates. It was only natural—they’d gone so long without contact.
But it didn’t last. Silvain was in too much of a hurry right now.
“So here’s the thing, Sanders. When you were in Taeibun, did you ever run into a boy named Frontdier?”
Even as Silvain asked, he held no real hope. Frontdier would have been just one of countless people there—no reason Sanders would remember him.
-Of course! You mean Frontdier de Roach?
Surprisingly, Sanders remembered him clearly. More than that, there was something almost fond in how he spoke the name.
“…Ah? Yes. That Frontdier.”
Silvain explained the situation to Sanders in measured terms. He couldn’t go into too much detail, but conveyed the general sense: Frontdier was planning to do something dangerous, reckless.
Listening quietly, Sanders spoke.
-Let him. Whatever it is.
“…What?”
Silvain thought he’d misheard.
“He’s not even an adult yet—just a boy! He’s planning to walk straight into the jaws of danger!”
Now Silvain was the one trying to persuade Sanders.
Let him? How could those words come from a knight’s mouth? Sanders?
-Haha.
Yet Sanders only laughed.
-I don’t know what Frontdier’s planning to do, but just leave him be. Actually, it’d be even better if you helped him actively.
“But…?”
Had the man changed? Had he dialed the wrong number?
It was Sanders. Definitely Sanders.
Then Sanders added one more thing.
-In a while, you’ll be crying tears of gratitude. To me. And to Frontdier.

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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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