The Genius Professor Wants An Easy Life - Chapter 97

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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 97
“I’ve always intended to give you this Staff.”
A lie, of course.
But Libel, not in his right mind, reacted with confusion.
“R-really? Wait, no. You’re lying. There’s no way you’d give such a gift to a monster like me….”
“You’re not a monster.”
“I am a monster!!”
Crash!!
A violent surge of energy assaulted me once more.
My chest tightened a little, but I didn’t let it show.
‘This is a battle of will right now.’
I thought back to my days as a sales ace.
You had to press forward with momentum, force the other person to nod in agreement.
“You say you’re a monster? Then kill me.”
“!!”
Footstep.
I walked toward Libel.
“D-don’t come closer!!”
“Why are you hesitating? I won’t put up any defense. If you’re going to kill me, then do it.”
In truth, I wasn’t putting up a shield because Libel’s energy was so overwhelming that my pathetic shield would be useless anyway—but I framed it as trust in him.
“Didn’t I tell you not to come?!”
Boom!
This time it was dangerous.
An explosion swept across the space right in front of me.
Yet it still didn’t touch even the hem of my clothes.
I watched Libel’s hands trembling.
“Are you afraid?”
“!!”
“You’re doing this because you’re terrified of being hated, aren’t you?”
Libel’s rampage was not an attempt to hurt anyone at all.
Rather, it was like the thrashing of a hedgehog trying not to be wounded.
“P-professor, you don’t understand. What kind of monster I am. How I was born. Or rather, ‘made.'”
“I know.”
Libel’s eyes went wide as saucers.
I made a bitter expression.
Not a fabricated one.
I recalled Libel’s past.
All sixteen protagonists had their own stories, but Libel’s was excessive.
“I am Ban Ecclesia. There is nothing I don’t know. Your past—all the pain you endured. All your anguish. Every tear you shed. I know it all.”
The truth was.
Libel truly was a monster.
One created with deliberate intent.
‘The Heavens-Breaking Project.’
At the pinnacle of this world stood Level 9 Ascendants.
The Ascendants were beings beyond the sky and typically didn’t involve themselves deeply in worldly affairs, yet no one could deny that they were the center of this world.
‘Even the imperial family of the Reinhardt Empire could only endure through the protection of the Ascendant Guardian.’
There were those who sought to overturn this order.
—to return the world to its original masters, ordinary humans.
This was their purpose.
The problem was the method.
‘To create a human weapon capable of slaying Ascendants, they built a place called ‘the House’ and gathered a thousand children, taught them Vampiric Magic, and made them kill each other until only five remained.’
A forbidden art that absorbed the opponent’s innate life force.
The younger the child, the denser that force.
In other words, the energy that Libel carried was the life force of other children.
“U-ugh. Then you should understand. I’m a monster. A monster.”
Libel’s eyes welled with tears, and then he did something reckless.
“I-I don’t deserve to live. It would be better just to die.”
He suddenly turned his energy inward, attempting to detonate himself!
There was even a suicide ending in Libel’s character gameOver path, so this wasn’t mere bluffing.
‘No!’
“Get your head on straight. Are you going to betray the friends who died before you?”
“…B-betray?”
“If you’ve survived, isn’t it the duty of the living to honor those who came before—to live well enough for them too?”
Libel’s eyes wavered.
It wasn’t just a careless remark.
-Whoever survives, we forget it all and become happy. We’ll make real friends outside and live ordinary lives. The dead will bless the living friend’s happiness.
It was a promise Libel had made with his “friends” in that hell of killing and dying back at the house.
Never to resent.
Instead, let the one who lived grow happy enough for all of them.
That was why Libel had tried so hard to make friends at the academy.
“B-but… a monster like me doesn’t deserve that. I should just die now….”
Why?
Watching Libel writhe in anguish, irritation suddenly surged through me.
Perhaps it was the memory of being cast out by people when I was young.
“What do you keep calling yourself a monster for? The monsters are the ones who made you suffer like this.”
“!!”
“Libel, you came to the Sealed Ground to keep from hurting other people, didn’t you?”
Libel hesitated, then nodded.
But that wasn’t all.
‘Normally, when he goes berserk, that bastard teacher appears and makes him lash out at everyone around him.’
To strip Libel of any reason to return.
Yet he seemed to be holding it back through sheer will.
“If anyone calls you a monster, bring them to me. Ecclesia won’t forgive them. Even if that someone is you yourself.”
“!!”
Katrine stepped forward beside me.
“An idiot second-year like you being called a monster—that’s rich. Keep talking nonsense and you’ll get a loving smack from your senior. You haven’t even paid back the five penas you borrowed from me, and you’re talking about dying? Pay back your debt first. That’ll be ten thousand penas with interest.”
“I… I… don’t like you. I’m not going to be friends with you.”
“Ha! Who are you to say that! I only hung around because I felt sorry for you!”
“Don’t get it twisted. It was me who hung around because I felt sorry for you.”
After a brief, childish quarrel.
“Uuuaaahhhgh.”
Libel burst into tears.
All the sorrow built up until now had come pouring out.
Katrine and I exchanged a glance, then approached Libel.
We reached out as if to embrace him—
Fwoom!
—and deployed Sealing Magic instead.
“!!”
Libel’s eyes flew wide in shock, but it was too late.
“Katrine!”
“I’ve been waiting for that opening! Time for big sister’s loving smack!”
Thwack!
Katrine brought the pommel of her sword down across the back of Libel’s head, and he crumpled to the ground.
‘Good. If we hadn’t done it this way, he’d have gone berserk again no matter his intentions.’
I gazed into the darkness beyond.
Fwoom!
I heard the sound of someone vanishing.
The “teacher” who’d been manipulating Libel’s rampage from behind.
‘No point chasing. They’re careful operators.’
‘The House.’
More precisely, the “patrons” behind it never reveal their identities.
‘I’ll seal off Libel’s energy so he doesn’t go berserk again.’
But that energy was currently fused with Libel himself—erasing it was impossible.
The House wouldn’t make another move for a while, so this would suffice.
Just then, Hans and Linden arrived, late.
“Young Master! Are you unharmed?! This Hans has rushed here prepared to face death itself for your sake!”
“Put down that Escape Scroll in your hand first, Uncle. Hehe, well, it was actually me who told him to come? Ah, there’s no need to be so moved or anything. Instead, there’s this… good opportunity I wanted to mention… Oh, just hear me out!”
Julia and Wilhelm were there as well.
They’d been exorcising the ghosts that had appeared at the academy, and it seemed they’d rushed over after hearing the news.
“Hmm, something doesn’t sit right with me. I’m supposed to be the one leading the charge to help Professor Ban.”
“I… I just want to go back to my quarters! I’m scared!”
Thump-thump!
Hearing that cacophony, my tension suddenly uncoiled.
‘Has it come to an end?’
I’d thwarted the Cult and Black Tower’s scheme, and dealt with the Abyss’s skeletal demon as well.
Thanks to the anti-phantom armor I’d arranged in advance with the Security Forces, Phase 4 would wrap up without incident.
‘Fortunately, I didn’t need to use the contingency I’d prepared as a last resort. Even this deleted night episode would end this way…’
But then.
My face went rigid.
A chill ran through me.
My skin crawled.
It was the instinctive alarm I’d always felt just before danger struck.
‘What? What else could possibly go wrong here?’
The problem was that this sense of crisis felt far more intense than what I’d experienced before.
‘Were all the previous crises not the real ones?’
And then.
I understood the source of the dread.
Clap-clap.
“Ah, Professor Han, I watched your performance today. Your meticulous preparations against the three evils, the miracles you brought forth with your own hands, and finally, that touching drama with your student! Perfect.”
A smooth, oily voice.
“Professor Linden?”
A fellow temporary professor in this competition.
The one with the least presence, yet who’d always bothered me somehow.
“What’s this sudden business?”
“Haha. I suppose I should reintroduce myself.”
As the scene unfolded before us, everyone’s eyes shot wide open.
Whoooosh.
Black wings unfurled from Linden’s back.
They weren’t real wings.
They were shadows.
More precisely, Black Shadow Wings.
The mark of a high-ranking demon.
‘Linden is a demon? How did he conceal his Demonic Energy all this time? Ordinary demons can’t hide it…’
No one—not even I—had seen through Linden’s true nature.
The reason was simple.
Linden was no ordinary demon.
“Allow me to reintroduce myself. I am Count Linden of the Demon Realm. I serve as an aide to Grand Duke Roshuran.”
“!!”
A Count-rank high demon!
But that wasn’t all.
At the mention of ‘Grand Duke Roshuran,’ my face went pale.
‘Now that the Demon King has vanished, he’s practically one of the colossal forces dividing and ruling the Demon Realm.’
If Linden served as an aide to such a being, it meant he was a real power in the Demon Realm.
Among the high-ranking Count-level demons, he’d be among the most formidable.
And yet, I felt confusion.
“Bold, aren’t you? Do you have a death wish? Revealing your identity so openly, even for a high-ranking demon like yourself?”
Count-rank high demons are said to possess roughly Level 7 strength.
No one would dare underestimate such a powerhouse, but this place is enemy territory from a demon’s perspective.
Moreover, it’s an academy where powerful beings in professorial robes abound.
‘The reason I struggled earlier with the Abyss’s skeletal demon and the Black Tower’s emissary was because Phase 4 was happening simultaneously. Now that things are settling, I can capture him easily enough.’
Revealing his identity so openly now was tantamount to suicide.
Unless,
‘he has something prepared.’
That was the moment.
A fact surfaced in my mind.
That this place is the Sealed Ground, and what manner of place the Sealed Ground truly is.
The Sealed Ground was no mere dangerous location.
‘It was where Mysteries slumber.’
‘Surely not?’
“Haha, you’ve already grasped it, I see. I’ve come to Rubinesse Academy to obtain the Mystery sealed here—one that will bring glory to our Demon Realm.”
Mystery.
The word refers to miracles that cannot be explained by the world’s logic and laws.
“We plan to use the Mystery of the Moon sealed in this place to open the Lunar Gate and create Moonlight Stones.”
“!!”
It was a name I’d heard before.
For reference, the power that demons use is called Demonic Energy.
The true nature of Demonic Energy was ‘the power of Darkness and the Moon.’
In other words, the Lunar Gate was a magic circle that gathered Demonic Energy.
Moonlight Stones were objects made from that Demonic Energy crystallized.
‘The owner’s Demonic Energy would amplify enormously.’
The problem was that the moment the Lunar Gate opened, an immense surge of lunar force—that is, Demonic Energy—would detonate, laying waste to everything around it.
It meant the Academy would suffer irreversible damage.
We had to stop it, but—
“Ha ha, you’re too late. The Blessing of Moonlight is already descending.”
Linden’s eyes glimmered with white moonlight.
The Demonic Energy was being amplified.
Worse, the intensity of the amplification grew stronger by the second.
My face went pale.
‘At that level, it’s power equivalent to Level 8 or higher.’

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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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