WeTried Translations x Flame Comics
Translator/Editor: Hydrogen B
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Chapter 120: 17. A Muggle-Born Wizard’s Method of Managing Grades (1)
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* * *
There was a psychoanalytic model commonly called the five stages of grief. It divides the process by which someone recognizes an extreme situation into five stages.
The students who learned that a Counterintelligence Command agent had stolen their entire vacation were, sadly, experiencing Earth’s advanced culture firsthand.
The first stage was [Denial].
“No. This isn’t real. There’s no way something like this could be real, right? Hehe, of course.... Being hospitalized for the entire vacation. Hehehe... I really do have quite an imagination.”
During her first week in the hospital, Isabelle smiled brightly and gently shook her head.
On the first day, it had definitely been an unfamiliar ceiling. Yet even after a week in the hospital, it was still an unfamiliar ceiling.
When would the familiar tiles of my lovely mansion’s ceiling appear up there?
Isabelle’s smile faded before the week was over.
The second stage, [Anger].
“How could someone... I, I peeled apples for him every day and fed them to him myself when he was hospitalized!! He put me in the hospital, and he hasn’t visited even once...?!!”
From that point on, no one attempted to enter Isabelle’s room except the priests who came to care for her.
The anger of a knight who had just crossed the threshold into superhuman territory sometimes manifested physically. They could kill people with murderous intent alone.
Sadly, Isabelle’s progress stopped there. Her anger did not advance to the [Bargaining] stage before vacation ended.
The first to reach the [Bargaining] stage was Aesidis.
“Father. I am doing well. I am hospitalized because several bones are broken, but the Saintess is such a gentle person. Ah, if you are wondering why I look like this, it is nothing serious. I simply became a victim of domestic violence. I have just been brought to the emergency room after suffering my husband’s merciless abuse. But I will be fine. I shall overcome it through the power of love. Please do not worry, but do come visit at least once. That is all. From your loving Aesidis.”
Aesidis muttered gloomily as she sealed the envelope with wax.
A few days later, Einar received her letter by express delivery and summoned Mord to ask what had happened.
“Ah, I heard Ivan put them through some training. Apparently, he locked them in the mountains and released some orcs....”
“Orcs? How many?”
“I understand there were around thirty, brother.”
“Esi alone?”
“No. Oscar, Elphihara, and Isabelle were with her.”
Einar quietly set down the letter and smiled with satisfaction.
“Memories. I had days like that too. Haha... It is a peaceful age. Only thirty orcs. Did you know that the standard orc formation on the first battlefield where I fought alongside Maximilian was three hundred strong?”
“Ah, right. That was how it was back then. Kids these days are really...”
“It’s fortunate Ivan is going easy on them. Otherwise, the children might have gone soft. This is good.”
“Yes, brother.”
Aesidis had chosen the wrong person to bargain with. She had forgotten that Droan warriors did not negotiate. (She should have bargained with the Saintess instead.)
After that, Aesidis sent several unanswered letters home and seethed in loneliness.
Elves, whose thoughts ran on a different track from foolish humans, had long since moved past those stages.
The fourth stage, [Depression]. At this stage, Elphihara had her servants fill one side of her hospital room with books.
Most were books on training methods for different dog breeds.
“The latest conclusion in academia is that most behavioral problems in dogs are their owner’s fault.”
“Yes, Miss Grikenkos.”
“So if a dog bites people, pees wherever it wants, or invites its owner into the mountains and throws them before thirty orcs, that also means it is the owner’s fault.”
“...I-I see? The dog did that?”
“Mhm. They say those things rarely happen if you walk them often, prepare their meals yourself, and manage their stress by playing fetch or tug-of-war together. That was this book’s conclusion.”
“...Aha.”
Elphihara’s servant nodded listlessly. For days now, Elphihara had been muttering, “Yes, it’s my fault. I was bad. That’s not how one should raise a dog. There’s no such thing as a bad dog.”
The subject was certainly wholesome, yet it felt strangely cold, so the servant unconsciously cast a warming spell. Krasilov’s summers seemed rather chilly compared to Kallion’s.
At last, when vacation was nearly over.
As their discharge date approached, the three of them reached the final stage at once.
Sadly, they did not reach [Acceptance]. They returned to [Anger].
“You’re late... mister.”
Their anger was directed at the man who had not visited even once.
“At this rate, I’ll become an old lady, you know?”
They concluded they needed a more decisive solution.
EP17. A Muggle-Born Wizard’s Method of Managing Grades.
-Drip, drip, drip.
At times like this, it always rained.
Ivan stood in the rain, recalling films from Kim Seonwoo’s days, memories that had become hazy even to him.
It was a Hollywood movie cliché. Whenever the protagonist stood before a gravestone, the sky was overcast and rain fell.
In truth, it often rained in Pritchenkaya around this time. It was the last downpour that came with the start of autumn. After this, snow would fall.
“What are you doing standing here so miserably without an umbrella, senior?”
“Dmitry.”
Ivan glanced at the umbrella held over his head, then lowered his gaze again. Raindrops struck the gravestone.
The National Cemetery for the Fallen, located in one corner of Pritchenkaya Central Park, lay silent beneath thick mist.
-Ivan Petrovich.
-1236 - 1268
Every fallen member of the Annihilation Unit was buried in an unnamed cemetery within the Counterintelligence Command, including those whose bodies could not be recovered.
They left behind no epitaphs. The records of Annihilation Unit agents were erased the moment they died. Even their families never knew of their accomplishments, so the only proof they had existed was the memories of their comrades.
So when Ivan had faked his death, many people must have helped him leave behind even a gravestone like this.
Afterward, Ivan visited his own grave once a year, on the day of his official death. He came to mourn the dead, not himself, with guilt over being the sole survivor tangled together with the shame of being the only one whose name remained.
His grave, beneath which an empty coffin lay buried, was the only place left for those who had died back then. Only one person’s name remained here, but beneath that empty coffin were the names of roughly seven hundred agents who had fought beside him.
This was hypocrisy.
Ivan stood there for a long time, looking down at the gravestone beneath the pouring rain.
“I received the report, senior. You put a fine full stop to it. You should be smiling.”
Click, click. The sound of a flint striking came from behind him. Sssizzle, cigarette smoke rose with a harsh smell.
Dmitry took a half-crumpled cigarette pack from his pocket as he stood beside Ivan.
“Would you like one?”
“I quit.”
“These ones haven’t.”
At those words, Ivan quietly looked down at the cigarettes. They were standard-issue military cigarettes stamped with the Krasilov seal. Strong, bitter, tasteless, and reeking of fish.
Cigarettes were poison to agents. During infiltration operations, the ember was far too easy to spot, and the smoke lingered on the body for a long time, making it dangerous against demonfolk with keen senses of smell.
At the same time, they were the agents’ only comfort. They were the only thing that could comfort agents who had to survive and fight death for years in enemy territory, where they could see neither their families nor even others of their own kind.
Alcohol severely impaired physical responsiveness. Agents never drank during an operation. Cigarettes, though, remained their only comfort in places where safety was secured.
That was why every agent smoked in those days. In fact, every soldier back then did.
It had been a war they could not endure without these short little sticks.
Ivan pulled a cigarette from Dmitry’s hand and put it between his lips. Click. A lighter was held politely near his face.
With a gloved hand, Dmitry respectfully shielded the flame by Ivan’s lips. Sssizzle. The smoke heated Ivan’s lungs.
Hoo.
White smoke mingled with the mist and disappeared.
The sensation of nicotine seeping into his mind was strangely dizzying. Cheap tobacco leaves with a fishy smell burned away, releasing harsh smoke.
Ivan took two more deep drags, then set the cigarette in one corner of the gravestone with a long breath.
Sssizzle. Drenched by rainwater, the cigarette soon went out with a faint trail of smoke.
It was an incense offering that lasted only a moment. Ivan followed the last wisp of smoke rising from the cigarette toward the sky, then pressed hard at the corner of his eye in the rain.
A few seconds later, Ivan lowered his head again. His voice had returned to the same dry tone as before.
“Do you have something to report?”
“Yes, senior. We have received a report that Count Balika has finished the ‘suppression of rebels’ in Andgrund. The count was complaining that negotiations with the General Secretary were making little progress.”
“Something other than the obvious.”
“The count would like to meet you once.”
“Count Balika?”
“Grand Duke Volonovin, most likely. We expected Grand Duke Volonovin to notice, did we not?”
One of Krasilov’s Three Grand Dukes, commander of the Northern First Corps, and military governor of the northern demonfolk territory. Marshal Volonovin. Ivan nodded as he turned the old name over in his mind, as if opening an old file.
“What else?”
“They have unearthed Aviditas’s celestial chart. As agreed at the beginning of the negotiations, the Northern Second Corps will receive the results of the Andgrund negotiations in full, while the Counterintelligence Command will take possession of Aviditas’s celestial chart.... Is that acceptable? The treasures that lizard collected cannot be ordinary items.”
“I don’t need them. Sell what can be sold, and burn everything that can’t be converted into cash.”
“Yes, senior.”
All wealth acquired by agents during operations naturally became part of the royal treasury. But if it was the hoard of one of the Seven Dragon Generals, calling its value astronomical would still not be enough.
They had been leaders of entire peoples. Their treasure vaults contained every kind of wealth a people could possess throughout its history, piled layer upon layer.
Aviditas had been the leader of the necromancers. Most of that enormous hoard was probably too contaminated to use, but even the remainder would be enough to establish an entire battalion.
Ivan shook his head briefly. He did not need wealth. The orphanage received full support for its operating expenses, and he could draw activity funds from the treasury. What meaning could personal wealth have beyond that?
“Lastly, um. The Princess said something strange.”
“What?”
“She said you would be... a professor...?”
“Mm.”
“Who are you going to teach? Students, of all people? Really?”
“Mm.”
“You mean not just the Hero Party’s children, but regular students too, throughout the semester? You?”
“Mm.”
“This is a disaster.... I wonder if there are any plots left at the cemetery....”
From the tournament hosted by the Princess to the Andgrund war, Ivan’s actions had already become too widely known.
Few people had yet realized that he was “that Ivan from back then.” Ivan Petrovich was simply too common a name.
But under his public identity, Ivan could no longer work undercover. He had made far too spectacular a display of himself.
Then it was only right to use that, as rationally as possible, now that his name carried such weight.
“I thought I should prepare.”
This game’s difficulty design seemed rather strange.
* * *
On the first day after returning home, Ivan sat at his desk, opened his notebook, and sank into thought.
He reviewed the stages he had arranged along the timeline since the Tutorial event began, and an uneasy feeling had been growing in him.
The field practicum attack. In that stage, most playable characters would have died without outside assistance.
But that was secondary. Enrika had been nearby, so the stage’s solution likely only required them to hold out for a certain amount of time.
The Pritchenkaya underground air raid immediately afterward had also seemed fairly reasonable in its design, apart from the boss.
The problem came after that. The boss Ivan had dealt with in the Academy Chamber of Secrets was an existence beyond all standards. It had lost every power except divine power and had been sealed away, but that situation had only come about through a series of coincidences.
By chance, dwarves had stripped away the outer layer of the seal. By chance, Elizaveta had detected it. By chance, Ivan had been there to break the seal and enter.
What would have happened without Ivan’s role in it? The boss, which had steadily gathered power beneath Pritchenkaya, would likely have appeared in the latter half of the story and burned the entire city to the ground.
Even if he had dealt with a late-game boss early, did that not mean Pritchenkaya would have suffered enough damage to burn down in the original storyline?
‘And now, even the Andgrund civil war.’
Without Ivan, Enrika would never have intervened in Andgrund’s civil war alone. Given the circumstances, the General Secretary would have lost, and the anti-human dwarves would have unified the underground city.
Then they would have fully restored Aviditas’s power and perhaps even obtained divine power, beginning to rule northern Krasilov alongside a new member of the Seven Dragon Generals.
By then, the Northern Army could never stop them.
By chance, Ivan, who had once happened to kill Aviditas before, intervened before the civil war ended and cut away the foundation for that later storyline.
But if the storyline had followed its original timeline... Krasilov would certainly have fallen at that point. It would have lost Pritchenkaya and its northern base.
And the fall of Krasilov would be a fatal blow to the north of the Allied Kingdoms. The final bulwark defending the northern front’s border would collapse.
‘What if situations like this are happening throughout the Allied Kingdoms?’
Ivan looked down at a map of the Allied Kingdoms with a grave expression. The northern, western, and southern fronts. All waters except those around the Kalion Archipelago. The other countries bordering demonfolk territory.
Would they still have the national strength to withstand a second great war? No. There was no way they would.
Every sign pointed to a new war. Ivan was a rational man, so he did not assess situations through hope.
When clear circumstantial evidence presented itself, Ivan picked up an axe and pistol instead of relying on persuasion or rationalization. This situation clearly bore the signs of approaching war, and war was not something Ivan could handle alone.
After due consideration, Ivan was appointed to a professorship at Saint Yansk University.
Fortunately, Elizaveta fully supported his opinion. Not the part about war, but the part about becoming a university professor. (A professor’s lecture curriculum could be constrained by the dean’s authority, whereas a Princess could not easily constrain the operational plans of an Annihilation Unit agent.)
Thus, three general education courses unrelated to their majors were newly added to the first-year second-semester curriculum at Saint Yansk University. Thanks to the dean’s full support, they carried absurdly high credit values, yet it was announced that grades would be classified as P/F only.
A perfect class.
* * *
“This... this feels like a trap.”
The students who had completed Ivan’s classes as summer courses realized it the moment they read the course descriptions.
* * *
Footnotes:
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