The Academy’s Weapon Replicator - Chapter 178

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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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Academy Weapon Replicator Episode 178
Chapter 57: Sacrifice (3)
Rain streaked down from the sky in graceful arcs, finding their mark among the monsters. One shaft per creature, each arrow piercing clean through a monster’s vital point.
Krisella Kathos targets the enemy’s weak points—which meant it avoided the Dark Binding that the Black Monsters had laid down. The divine arrows passed through the monsters’ bodies, striking only at the weakest areas untouched by that binding.
Unless every critical spot was completely sealed in Dark Binding, such sealing meant nothing to Krisella Kathos.
‘Look straight… carefully…!’
Frontdier forced his spasming eyes open and traced the arrows’ trajectory. He paid no attention to the monsters outside. His gaze fixed only on the Black Monsters.
Krisella Kathos hunted weak points. Unlike the outer monsters avoiding Dark Binding, there was no point in evading it against creatures that were black all over.
So by watching where the arrows struck now, he could discern the Black Monsters’ true vulnerability.
Right now it was far more efficient than Analysis.
‘…The spine? The spine itself?’
The arrows meant for the Black Monsters didn’t pierce their heads or hearts—they struck the center of their spines. Some did penetrate the skull, but the vast majority bored straight through the spine’s core.
He burned each strike indelibly into his vision,
“Krraaaghhhh!! Hah… nngh…!”
Frontdier screamed, his hands trembling. The bow lost all form, collapsing into black liquid that poured across the ground.
Frontdier had trained through Mana Depletion as a discipline. He no longer lost consciousness from it.
He’d grown accustomed to the depletion itself, learned to pull forth the mana that came after. The memory of forcing down a Dragon Heart before Penelope’s thread existed had also served him well.
But there was a reason humans lost consciousness upon reaching Mana Depletion.
“Kh… hah…!”
His breathing had never steadied since then. Spittle ran down his lips in an ugly stream. Something—cold sweat, perhaps—clouded his vision and dripped from his nose. Some drops fell to the ground; some clung to his helmet.
Casting magic with depleted mana meant substituting something else in its place. Blood, sweat—when that proved insufficient, something far more precious.
Normally this method was never granted to humans, but Frontdier’s body—having swallowed a Dragon Heart and clawed back from death’s edge—still carried that memory. Yet it was undoubtedly the wrong way.
“Hey, are you… are you alright…?”
A soldier who’d been barking orders moments before came running up, eyeing Frontdier’s complexion warily.
Unless he was blind, it was obvious who had just fired that arrow.
The man had thought him just another common soldier in a helmet. He was mistaken. The commanding officer watched Frontdier with careful tension.
“Target their backs.”
“W-what?”
“Their backs. The center of the spine is the weak point. You don’t need perfect accuracy—a rough strike there will be fatal.”
In truth, the arrows hadn’t even struck the spine’s precise center. That entire region was probably vulnerable. While thinking the head or chest held the weak point, they’d fought with difficulty. But now that the critical spot was revealed, killing them would come far easier.
“Hey, who the hell are yo—”
The man finally came to his senses and started to raise his voice, then closed his mouth.
The look in Frontdier’s eyes, visible through the helmet’s gaps. That single glance drained all his confidence.
“…Listen! The weak point of those black things is the back! Aim for the center of the spine!”
The man quickly moved away, grabbed an easier-looking soldier, and shouted the information. It was so vital, so urgent, that it spread from mouth to mouth in a heartbeat.
‘For now, I’ve held the line…’
The Firecracker had swept through countless monsters. Yet even after their destruction, the creature army pressed on. Only a brief respite had been bought.
An endless tide of monsters. At this point, it was less a question of whether the Barrier would break and more whether the soldiers and knights would have any strength left to draw their blades before they were all consumed.
Then Frontdier’s gaze caught the Heukcheon flowing across the ground. The Necklace with Restoration Magic would soon pull every drop of that black water back up, but until then it simply spread in all directions as liquid.
And that Heukcheon touched the Dark Binding—created from the corpses of the Black Monsters from moments before, bundled into one mass.
It was nothing remarkable, merely the inevitable result of gravity and fluid flow.
‘…Worth a try.’
Frontdier reached out. Toward the Dark Binding the Black Monsters had woven, and toward the Heukcheon that touched it.
The Heukcheon wasn’t normally something Frontdier could manipulate in open air. It wasn’t a weapon forged from Menosthorpho. Once it left his hand, it was just simple liquid.
But when Frontdier reached toward the flowing Heukcheon, grasped it, and pulled back,
Glug-glug-glug—
“Wh-what? Look!”
“The mountain of corpses is collapsing!”
A nearby soldier cried out in alarm.
The slope the monsters had used to climb over the Barrier, that singular mound where corpses had gathered, lost its binding force and scattered like trash swept before the wind. Released from the power that had held it, it came apart naturally under gravity’s pull.
And that Dark Binding which had held those monsters together, that Heukcheon,
“…Indeed.”
Was now clutched in Frontdier’s hand.
Clearly more than the Heukcheon he’d originally possessed.
‘The Heukcheon was in Krisella Kathos form until just now, so my mana lingers in a good portion of it.’
He’d accounted for that much. Of course, as time passed that mana would dissipate, but for a brief window he should be able to command even the Heukcheon that had fallen from his hand.
Yet even the Dark Binding—originally cast by the Black Monsters themselves—had returned to his grasp the moment it touched his Heukcheon.
In other words,
‘…There’s mana in this Dark Binding too.’
It was certainly not Frontdier’s mana. It was the Black Monsters’—or more precisely, the Helheim Fragment itself. Yet the instant it touched Frontdier’s Heukcheon, every trace of that mana rushed back into his hand as though he were its master.
As if the master of Mana had changed to Frontdier.
Proving it, Frontdier had used no Mana at all when he ‘recovered’ Heukcheon just moments before.
“…….”
Frontdier wore a peculiar expression as he clenched and unclenched the Heukcheon that had come into his palm. Each time he applied pressure, the metal hardened, and the blade moved in dazzling patterns, remaining in his grasp.
And then.
Growwwl?
A Black Monster’s eyes met Frontdier’s.
“…….”
Frontdier regarded the creature in silence for a moment. The Black Monster, oddly, made no move to attack—it simply stared at Frontdier with a vacant expression.
The Black Monsters newly born from the Helheim Fragment possessed immature consciousness. They held only endless malice toward humans and murderous intent.
Even their strategy of binding the mountain of corpses into a single mass was not something they devised themselves—they had merely received orders to do so.
So naturally, when faced with a human like Frontdier, they should have lunged forward, unable to contain their killing rage. Yet for some reason, this one remained motionless, nailed in place, simply watching him.
──The monster’s instinct had spoken.
If it attacked Frontdier now, something far worse than death would await it.
Screech, screech, shriek!!
Having made its judgment, the Black Monster turned and fled. Whatever Frontdier meant to do, what burned in his eyes was not the intention to kill a monster.
Had it been so, the Black Monster would have attacked him long ago.
The Black Monster retraced its path up the Barrier, diving through the air without so much as a backward glance.
What dwelt in Frontdier’s eyes was not murderous intent. It was—
“Where do you think you’re going?”
Whish—
Thud!
Frontdier sharpened the Heukcheon and drove it through the Black Monster’s back. The creature hung suspended in mid-air, impaled. He had not formed any specific weapon. Instead, he had controlled the lingering Mana, stretching Heukcheon like a long branch and piercing the monster with it.
“I want to test something.”
From repeated combat and severe Mana Depletion, Frontdier bore the clear marks of exhaustion. Yet his lips curved in a smile. It was neither bravado nor the smile of a man who had lost his mind. He had worn this same expression just before using Firecracker.
Did Frontdier know what that languid smile made his enemies think?
“Will you help me?”
The Black Monster understood none of his words.
Yet it grasped one thing clearly.
Frontdier was not thinking of killing the Black Monster.
He showed no interest in its death. Frontdier’s eyes—
—resembled those of a child tearing the wings from a dragonfly.
Crunch.
Just as Frontdier had recovered the Dark Binding he had inflicted on the monsters before, now he seized the Black Monster itself as if it were Heukcheon, dragging it toward him.
In an instant.
Kiiieeeek!!
The Black Monster shrieked. It was not a cry of pain but of terror. The sensation of losing itself—a newly born life transforming into something not alive, without even the act of death.
Literally, Frontdier was ‘recovering’ the Black Monster as Mana.
“Ugh, urgh, aaaagh……!”
Of course, performing such a dangerous act was not without cost to Frontdier himself. As he recovered the Black Monster, what he felt was less pain than revulsion.
He was now pulling Mana that had belonged to the Realm of the Dead into himself.
From two completely separate domains that would not acknowledge each other, using Heukcheon as intermediary, he seized the master of that Mana. A theft transcending mere murder—the realm of taboo itself.
Had an ordinary person attempted it, the screams of the dead and the stench of corpses, the very image of death itself, would have poured into that soul and driven them mad long before.
But Frontdier—
“Shut, up……!”
With just those words, he swept aside the Realm of the Dead.
Whoosh!
In a single moment, he had seized the Black Monster in his palm. The creature lost its form and became only Heukcheon. No—it became a Helheim Fragment.
“Urgh! Blech……!”
Frontdier barely suppressed the retching that rose in his throat. The aftermath of his battle with the Black Monster crashed down upon him all at once.
That all those effects came at once in the form of mere nausea spoke volumes—Frontdier was certainly not normal. Whether he himself understood this remained unclear.
“……It really is different.”
Frontdier observed the fragment in his hand. It resembled the Heukcheon he had always used, yet something fundamental differed in the aura it gave and the way it moved.
‘……Monsters born from the fragment.’
When Frontdier first heard that Black Monsters were born from Helheim Fragments, he had found it deeply puzzling.
Creating something could be dismissed as the work of a god interfering with Frontdier. If truly divine, such a being could make mountains rise with mere will.
But could a god create monsters using only Helheim Fragments? If fragments were truly identical to Heukcheon, a material that became metal merely when pressed, how could consciousness-bearing monsters emerge from something so simple?
Heukcheon was the residue left after the Helheim Fragment accomplished ‘something.’ This was what Frontdier had theorized before.
And now, the answer had come.
‘The Helheim Fragment possessed will from the beginning. The god simply extracted that will appropriately.’
Whether the Helheim Fragment itself abhors humanity, or whether a god instilled that abhorrence after extracting it, there was no way to know.
Either way, even a god could not spawn a monster from something devoid of will itself. If that were possible, there would have been no need to use the Helheim Fragment in the first place.
‘A monster born from a fragment, the will the fragment itself possesses, metal bearing consciousness…….’
And the master’s authority.
Frontdier had just felt it—that sensation when he wrenched the master of Mana from the Black Monster.
Remarkably, the feeling was not unfamiliar.
‘The Excalibur in the Lake was like that too.’
There was a time in the past when Frontdier had ventured into the Lake to claim the Excalibur. Of course, he had not managed to draw it, but he had held it in his hand.
The sensation just now, when reclaiming the Black Monster, had been much the same.
‘Now I understand. What the Helheim Fragment is. Or rather, what influence Helheim wielded over this world.’
After Ragnarok, the Helheim Fragment did not vanish completely from this world—fragments remained.
After that came the history humanity built atop the ruins, the footprints of heroes and their weapons.
And from that flowed legends like Excalibur, where the weapon itself chooses its master.
‘The power flowing from Helheim was the prototype of the Ego Sword.’
A weapon that bears its own will—the Ego Sword. And tracing back from that lineage stood Excalibur and Gram, weapons that choose their masters of their own accord.
If he wished, the very thing Frontdier now held possessed the potential to become another Ego Sword, given sufficient time and the right method.
“Well, that’s a matter for later.”
Frontdier’s face had grown considerably lighter as he surveyed the battlefield.
The Mana he had lacked was now replenished to a considerable degree thanks to the reclamation.
How many of the monsters had witnessed the Black Monster being drawn in with such brutality? Remarkably, traces of fear appeared in some of them.
The reclamation of the fragment—the Black Monster. If this remained within Frontdier’s capability,
then the Black Monsters should not be here at all.
They expended no Mana themselves; instead, they merely refilled the Mana of Frontdier, the greatest threat on this battlefield.
The Black Monsters, extracted over time to breach humanity’s Barrier.
“In games sometimes,”
From this very moment onward, they served but one purpose:
“enemies labor and craft weapons through bloodshed, and then I end up stealing them.”
They became nothing more than Frontdier’s Vessels.
“There’s something rather amusing about that.”
That woeful effort ending up slaughtering those on their own side instead.
Frontdier laughed, his expression belying the grimness of his words.

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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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