The Academy’s Weapon Replicator - Chapter 82

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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 Duplicator of the Academy — Episode 82
Chapter 24: Teyburn (4)
I climbed atop the Barrier Wall.
A bitter wind, sharp enough to cut, scraped against my skin.
This cold alone made this place sufficiently unbearable. And yet we had to hold back monsters on top of it all — hardly a living hell for nothing.
“……Will you be staying here the whole time?”
Sybel, standing beside me, asked the question.
Her maid’s uniform exposed far too much skin. Of course she’d be freezing in a place like this.
“Yes.”
“……I, um, could change into different clothes and come back…….”
“Isn’t your purpose to guard me? This is outside the building — worse, we’re on a Barrier Wall exposed to sniper fire. You’d leave me in this dangerous place and go?”
“No, no. I’ll stay at your side.”
With that, Sybel took her place beside me.
Her resolve was plain enough, but the trembling in her body was so visible I could see it with my own eyes.
I clicked my tongue.
“Go change. And from now on, wear something sensible regardless of what it is.”
“But this outfit is perfectly sensible. It’s just not suited to the season……,”
“I said go.”
Sybel nodded quickly at my words and disappeared.
I exhaled and examined the state of the Barrier Wall.
It was not good. Patches and repairs were visible everywhere, like a beggar’s worn clothes.
Where there were no stones, they’d used rubble; where there was no rubble, wood; when desperate, they’d scraped together cloth scraps and garbage and stuffed them wherever they could.
……Weaving had the ‘Restoration’ function. It was still locked, but leveling up might unlock it.
Of course, the monsters wouldn’t wait for that, so until then I’d have to fight before this unstable wall.
“……Normally, it should collapse.”
In fact, Teyburn falls during Constellation Academy’s break.
If you played the game normally, you’d learn this through conversations with Sybel and newspaper reports.
The wall crumbles, Teyburn becomes rubble, and only reinforcements of elite soldiers and knights barely manage to hold the line.
Teyburn doesn’t fall entirely, but the territorial contraction is inevitable.
The player Aster cannot prevent this sequence of events. Aster is a commoner, and forcing his way to Teyburn accomplishes nothing but placing him among the ranks of soldiers. Even surviving brings no meaningful change.
But.
……
I looked beyond the wall. Beyond the plains trampled by monsters, where even the outer monsters cannot tread, lay the Holy Forest.
The holy land visible from here — less than a kilometer away.
……Somewhere in that forest lies Excalibur, King Arthur’s blade.
Excalibur — a weapon whose performance and rank differ throughout the game — is so close precisely because Teyburn is ‘meant to fall.’
The outer monsters push Teyburn’s front line back, and then Excalibur naturally recedes along with it.
Only after massively raising a character’s abilities and barely managing to push back the outer monsters do players think, ‘Excalibur was so close all along!’ and understand.
Even if you realize this and restart the game as Aster, coming to Teyburn first, ultimately you’re simply watching Teyburn collapse before your eyes — the only conclusion is that the game was designed this way.
“Not right now.”
But I will reach that Excalibur before this break ends.
For now, there’s only the future where I’d be slaughtered by monsters if I went.
A sound of footsteps echoed.
Even strides, keeping a steady rhythm. I guessed the identity.
“So you’re here.”
Turning around at the voice, it was Robert, as I’d expected.
“Sir Robert.”
“Frontdier. What on earth is happening in Teyburn?”
A question I’d heard many times already. But since the confusion was justified, I smiled.
“Just … a sort of holiday assignment.”
“Coming to Teyburn as a holiday assignment. Does Constellation Academy want to kill its students?”
Constellation was taking the criticism in my stead.
“What about the other knights?”
“Still waiting. Well, they’re keeping quite busy chattering.”
They were probably still laughing at me.
Then again, if I’d heard from someone else that no one dies in Teyburn, I might have laughed too.
“Sir Robert, you’re quite formal. You’ve used polite speech with me since we first met.”
“I learned it from my superior. She uses formal speech everywhere, so I suppose I’ve picked up the habit.”
By superior, did he mean Empress Philly?
……But Philly’s formality surely wasn’t a matter of politeness.
“Why have you come here, Sir Robert?”
“I am a knight. I merely follow orders.”
“You speak without even knowing the reason?”
“In following orders, one comes to understand naturally enough.”
Truly devoted. It was easy to see why Philly kept him close.
I smiled wryly.
“If all the knights were like Sir Robert, that would be ideal.”
“They and I are not so different. This place is simply too harsh an environment.”
I half-agreed with Robert’s words. As I’d said before, in such conditions it might be better to go a little mad anyway.
But a harsh environment merely strips away pretense and lays bare a person’s true nature.
Not all knights possess Robert’s mindset. When they belong to the order and act together, they appear that way, and they believe it of themselves as well.
But in this desolate frontier, once they step away as individuals rather than as members of the order, they are merely human beings, not knights at all.
“Now, go inside. The Barrier Wall is terribly cold when there’s no fighting. Besides, I have things to attend to today.”
“Things to attend to?”
Now that I thought about it, I didn’t see Ridwig, who had sent me to the barracks. I’d assumed he’d sent the knights to the waiting room because of monsters.
But if it wasn’t monsters, why gather the knights in the waiting room?
“Were you not informed? The Princess is coming for an inspection.”
“The Princess, you say…”
There was only one princess now, wasn’t there?
The eldest had lost her position, and the second was too occupied with inheriting the throne.
“…Surely not that girl.”
“That girl?”
“Just talking to myself.”
* * *
Aten arrived at Teyburn leading the Imperial Knights.
For protecting just one person, it seemed excessive protection, but for Teyburn it was nothing unusual.
“Aten. You should return at once. This place is too dangerous. We cannot know when monsters might breach the Barrier Wall.”
A knight beside her spoke in grave tones.
“If the Barrier Wall is unstable, if monsters pour through and bring greater ruin because of it, then as one of the royal blood, it is my duty to examine the situation.”
Aten thought that even if it weren’t this particular holiday break, she would have had to visit Teyburn eventually.
Unlike Yeran Hes, which Ampere guarded, Teyburn was the empire’s most precarious frontier, even in the north.
Frontdier had been the occasion, but Aten’s concern for Teyburn’s people was genuine.
“…Very well. Let us make for lodgings then. The horses are exhausted.”
The journey here had not been easy.
For mere travel, a carriage would have been preferable, but considering the possibility of combat, horses were far more practical.
Unlike carriages, horses required food and rest and were sensitive to temperature—they suffered the same hardships as men.
They had come a great distance from the Capital to this place. The horses were weary, and the knights were no better off.
“Quite so. It has been a grueling march indeed.”
As Aten spoke, she swept her gaze across the assembled knights to assess their condition.
“You have all worked hard. There cannot be many who have ridden horses all the way from the Capital to here…?”
Then she paused.
At the edge of Aten’s vision, a single horse was clip-clopping along on its own.
At first she thought one of the knights had fallen behind. But that wasn’t it. The horse wore no barding, and the person atop it wore no armor—just plain clothes.
“…??”
The horse continued to clip-clop past Aten’s left side. The sight was so strange that it captured not just Aten’s attention but that of every knight present.
“…Ah, I suppose that’s a traveler. The rider appears to be asleep.”
“Yes, it seems so.”
Indeed, the woman riding atop the horse had her face buried in the horse’s neck, breathing slowly and evenly.
But there was something about her appearance, her silhouette, that seemed familiar—
“…Mmh? Are we here yet? If I’m awake, we must be, right?”
The rider stirred and sat up groggily.
Hair the color of pink, eyes of green. Disheveled locks and dust could not conceal the beauty and coquettish charm of that face.
“…Sybel?”
Aten called out the name without thinking.
The pink-haired woman turned her gaze toward Aten and opened her eyes wide.
“Oh my! Aten! What on earth? Why are you here? How did you get here? Wow, that’s really amazing!”
“…Those are precisely the questions I would like to ask you.”
Sybel Forte.
The girl blessed by the Blessing of Fate had come to Teyburn.
* * *
“Ha, you gave me quite a fright.”
Sybel exhaled, loosening the tension that had coiled in her shoulders since arriving at the lodging.
She’d been about to approach Aten without thinking when she found herself face to face with the tips of the knights’ spears.
Though Aten had stopped them, Sybel’s drowsiness had evaporated in an instant.
“Right, that’s true. Aten was a princess, after all. Old habits from Constellation Academy—I didn’t even notice.”
“I apologize. The knights were only thinking of my safety.”
“No, it’s my mistake.”
“……If we should happen to meet in any official capacity, it would be better if—well, if people didn’t see us too closely together. For your safety.”
“Right, of course. I’ll be more careful about proper decorum.”
Sybel nodded brightly, her expression open and understanding.
The two of them were alone in a guest room that Aten had borrowed from the lodging house. Without the other knights present, they could speak freely in this space.
“I see. Because of the inspection. You really do have a lot on your plate, don’t you?”
“……What brings you here, Sybel?”
Aten hadn’t expected Sybel to come at all. No one from Constellation Academy would have anticipated it.
Surely she hadn’t done something as absurd as coming for “training,” the way Frontdier had……
“Oh? I came because of Frontdier.”
“……!”
Sybel’s answer was matter-of-fact, and Aten found herself slightly taken aback.
Aten had come to Teyburn for the inspection, and that was clearly her primary purpose.
Yet in this moment, she felt she’d been less honest than Sybel.
“No, don’t misunderstand. I was just worried about him, so I came as a friend would.”
“……I see. Just worried, so you came all the way from the Capital to Teyburn……”
“Isn’t that guy ridiculous? Suddenly going off to Teyburn during break. How is it that rumors reach me faster than hearing it from him directly?”
“……I heard about it through rumors as well. I suspect Elody was the only one he told in person.”
“Right! Elody! He tells her directly but not me. Well, I suppose the rumors just spread too fast!”
Sybel said this while shaking her head, and Aten found herself swallowing involuntarily.
It seemed she needed to change the subject.
“How did you manage to get all the way here? It couldn’t have been an easy journey.”
“Oh, somehow or other? I had quite a bit of help? I suppose I was lucky?”
Aten might have thought Sybel’s response was deliberately vague, but Sybel was being truthful.
Most of what Sybel wanted seemed to be aided by coincidence and good fortune.
“I borrowed someone called Cassian from Constellation Academy. Incredibly clever. He seems to follow me around for some reason.”
“……You borrowed Cassian? Just like that?”
“Hmm? He lent himself willingly enough.”
“…….”
Aten’s mind insisted it shouldn’t have been so simple, but then again—the person in question was Sybel.
That alone was enough for Aten to find it somehow reasonable.

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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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