WeTried Translations x Flame Comics
Translator/Editor: Hydrogen B
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
Chapter 127: 18. A Date in an Academy Story (3)
──────
* * *
The following afternoon, Eugene gathered everyone involved in the matter and headed to the clubroom.
[The First Ivan Petrovich Yermof Emergency Countermeasure Meeting]
After scribbling across the blackboard, Eugene surveyed the room with a grave expression.
The cramped clubroom was packed with an oddly mismatched crowd. The six members of the Hero Party, including Isabelle, and the three transmigrators made nine people in total. With their fingers interlaced, they stared at one another with solemn expressions.
“All right, everyone, please focus.”
All eyes turned to Eugene. He cleared his throat and continued.
“I possess an authority granted by the Lord. I can quantify how much affection one person has for another.”
At that, Elphihara shot her hand into the air. Eugene ignored her and kept talking.
“It’s not magic. I told you, it’s an authority bestowed by the Lord. If you want to argue, come at me with theology, not magic.”
Elphihara quietly lowered her hand. Unfortunately, no priest was in attendance.
Just as Eugene, the clubroom’s only priest, was about to continue, Aesidis raised her hand.
“What is it?”
“You aren’t just saying that, you really mean quantitatively? How can you measure someone’s feelings? And how reliable is that?”
“As much as I believe in the existence of the Lord God. Any other questions?”
Aesidis’s sharp objection was crushed. Eugene nodded and continued.
“All right, I’ll show you undeniable proof. Miss Isabelle?”
“Yes?”
“Congratulations. Ninety-one points. Extremely favorable.”
“Eek!! Oh my god!! That’s out of a hundred, right? Mister feels that way about me...?!”
“No, that’s how you feel about my brother.”
“Then what on earth is the point of that...?”
Isabelle sat back down with a strange expression.
“The good news is that Miss Isabelle has the highest score. Ah, this one is my brother’s feelings toward Miss Isabelle.”
“Eek!!! Oh my god!! How many points?! I knew it. The Lord truly exists! Praise God!! Doesn’t anyone else believe in God? Are you all atheists?”
“Twenty-seven points. Neutral.”
“God is dead.”
Isabelle, who had jumped to her feet, sank back down in a daze, embracing Nietzschean philosophy. Eugene looked over the suddenly grim crowd and pointed at each person in turn.
“Miss Aesidis, twenty-six points.”
“Is that out of thirty?!”
“One hundred.”
“Wait! Wait, wait, wait!! Is it really okay to go around telling people their feelings like this without permission? I, I’m not ready to hear this. Unlike humans, elves have delicate sensibilities...”
“Miss Elphihara is at twenty-five points.”
“Eeeeeek!!”
The three of them screamed like high schoolers checking their grades, then were left devastated.
The score reveal continued for a while after that.
“For reference, I’m at twenty-one points. Fortunately, all of you scored higher than me. Anything below twenty is classified as hostile.”
“Does that mean Mr. Ivan is on the verge of treating Oswald and me as enemies...?”
“Let’s be grateful we aren’t enemies. I say this as someone who was once his enemy, but almost nobody has had their relationship rating with my brother change to hostile.”
“Why not?”
“Because they all died. I nearly died within three seconds myself.”
“Oh...”
“Was that really a person, or practically a beast, a predator at that...?” Yuri muttered fearfully.
Oscar looked over the despondent Hero Party group as though they were pathetic, then calmly asked, “So what use is any of this? As long as he isn’t hostile, does it really matter?”
“No, the problem starts the moment we realize my brother has people he truly likes.”
“Wh-who? Who are they?! Are they demonfolk or something?”
“Of course not. They’re all human, and the other thing they have in common is...”
Eugene paused to choose his words. He wanted to explain it as kindly as possible, but that was difficult.
“They’re all dead now.”
“...All of them?”
“Every one of them... Almost every one. Nearly everyone whose rating is above a certain level is already dead. Every person my brother once liked is gone.”
The transmigrators and the Hero Party members were speechless for a moment.
Ivan had spent nearly his entire life on the battlefield. And not just any battlefield, but that brutal war which had consumed half the continent in flames, a conflict called humanity’s final war.
How many people had lost their lives in that war? Half the Allied Kingdoms had literally been erased. It was an age when people who had lost their parents were common, and those who had lost siblings were even more common.
If Ivan had spent decades on the front lines in the middle of all that, how many people had he watched leave this world?
“...”
How could a person endure that? After everyone they had ever held even a little affection for had died, what kind of life could they possibly live?
Could that be called a human life? What did someone like that feel as they lived from one day to the next?
Isabelle suddenly bit her lip.
She remembered the curse they had received when they killed the Seven Dragon Generals. That vicious curse that suppressed the emotions in a person’s heart. Perhaps her father was in a situation much like Ivan’s.
Even so, Ivan smiled sometimes and shed tears at other times. Though those moments only came when he ate food from his homeland. Perhaps that meant there was still a chance.
A chance for him to live a better life. A chance to give him a better life.
Perhaps. No, certainly.
“Yes. That’s the problem. We all agree that my brother is fundamentally a little... somewhat... very...? Broken.”
“So?”
“If my brother truly had no interest in anyone, all of us would be at twenty points.”
Eugene tapped the blackboard confidently.
“Look at Miss Isabelle’s score of twenty-seven. That means the score can rise depending on what we do! From now on, our goal is to raise his affection rating to fifty points, in other words, favorable!”
“Favorable...!”
That was a rather pathetic score, wasn’t it?
Elphihara muttered with a frown.
Ignoring the elf’s remark, Eugene concluded, “If we can quantify his emotions, we can also learn which actions raise or lower his affection! We’ll use that to become important people to my brother and put his mind back together!”
“Wow!!”
“You’re a hero!”
Aesidis and Isabelle cheered.
Lucia, who had quietly listened to the conversation, raised her hand.
“So how do we do that? I mean, even if we know our senior brother’s like that... Is there an answer besides blindly showering him with gifts? We hardly get any time to see him separately in the first place.”
“Heh heh, that answer isn’t mine to give. Oswald?”
“Now it’s my turn. Please pay attention.”
Oswald rose from his seat and approached the blackboard. He erased everything written on it, then wrote in elegant handwriting.
[Anyone Can Do It, One-on-One Date]
“May I go home now?”
Oscar smiled brightly and nodded. Good. Let’s get away from these lunatics first.
His opinion was naturally buried beneath the cheers of the entire Hero Party group. The moment they finished cheering, they looked at each other suspiciously and sat down again.
Oscar, halfway through standing, awkwardly lowered himself back into his seat and sighed. By the principles of majority rule, his opposition had been voted down.
This was why democracy could never be the answer.
* * *
“My brother believes there’s a spy at this university. More than believes it, he’s seriously searching for one.”
“So?”
“The three of us will assist with my brother’s Spy Search. For that...”
* * *
After class, Ivan spotted three people watching him amid the students who, as usual, hurriedly fled the room.
The three transmigrators crept toward him with sinister smiles.
Eugene, at the front, rubbed his hands together and grinned wickedly.
“Brother, I’ve got a brilliant idea.”
“Hm?”
“You know, you said you were looking for a spy? Said there had to be one in this class.”
“And you failed to find one.”
Ivan was someone who understood opportunity cost. There was no need to repeat a method that had failed once in exactly the same way.
Even at Ivan’s cold reply, Eugene kept grinning.
“That was when I was alone. But what if the three of us work together? You know, Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei divided the world among the three of them, didn’t they?”
To spoil Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Liu Bei eventually lost to Cao Cao. Even under Ivan’s suspicious gaze, Eugene did not lose heart.
“If I want to check someone’s information, I need to get close to them first, right?”
“And?”
“And we have an expert at Getting Friendly here.”
He gestured toward Oswald.
“We failed because we each tried separately. If Oswald uses Getting Friendly to make the relationship between a suspect and me favorable, the Status Window will spill their information.”
“For the record, my role is kidnapping the suspects.”
“What do you think?”
“...Not bad.”
For an idea from these idiots, it was quite useful. More importantly, using a loophole in the Status Window against itself was exactly the sort of method he liked from transmigrators.
When Ivan silently nodded, Eugene grinned and whispered.
“But you know, common sense. There’s always a spy hiding in an academy, right?”
“Hm.”
“And most of the time, the protagonist exposes that spy. Along the way, the spy’s conspiracy throws the academy into danger once, right?”
“...You’re not wrong.”
“Then, if we expose the spy among ourselves first and observe for now, then naturally steer the protagonists in that direction later, wouldn’t that lead smoothly into clearing the stage, just like you said?”
Oh.
Ivan was almost moved. It had been a long time, a very long time, since he had seen someone discuss common sense.
As Ivan quietly nodded, Eugene’s smile deepened.
“Let’s handle one group at a time. We divide the students by their countries of origin. While we search for spies among them, Brother can pull aside the protagonist from that country and buy us a little time.”
Eugene opened a notebook and began scribbling confidentially.
Tilles, Isabelle, Oscar.
Droan, Aesidis.
Kallion, Elphihara.
Krasilov, Lucia....
* * *
A little earlier, back in the clubroom, Rundis, who had been listening to Eugene’s explanation, let out a shriek.
“Wait! Why am I not in the old man’s date lineup?!”
“Uh... Miss Rundis, didn’t you already go on dates with my brother during vacation?”
“No!! That’s completely separate from this! This is cheating! I won’t allow it!”
“Ignore that dwarf. Keep going. This sounds plausible.”
“Please leave me out of it. I’ll be satisfied if I can just train with Lord Yermof a little more.”
* * *
Ivan nodded, then looked at Eugene.
“Will you be all right without me? Searching for intelligence agents from hostile countries is a somewhat difficult operation for beginners.”
“Haha, come on, Brother. Do we look like beginners? With Mind Sorcery and the Status Window, we’re invincible.”
“Honestly, I think we’d be more capable than most agents in an Intelligence Command, Ivan.”
“...You’re not wrong.”
Ivan nodded heavily. The three had not completed proper training, but honestly, they could be useful if used correctly.
All three were strong enough to use Line-of-Fire Detection. On top of that, they possessed the abnormal ability known as the Status Window.
Yuri’s swordsmanship stood out enough that her practical exam scores surpassed Isabelle’s, while Oswald was the best among his peers in the Mind Sorcery school.
A truly excellent selection.
Ivan nodded reassuringly.
“Then let’s give your plan a try.”
It had been a long time since he had worked in support of someone else’s operation, but the feeling was not unpleasant. After all, he could not do everything alone.
* * *
In the clubroom, Isabelle raised her hand as she listened to Eugene’s explanation.
“What if we really do find a spy? Then Mister will obviously lose his mind again and start saying, ‘That bastard needs to die.’”
“Ahem.”
At Isabelle’s question, Eugene rubbed his hands together and grinned wickedly.
“How could that happen?”
Common sense said that a university under twenty-four-hour surveillance by the Counterintelligence Command, with a princess personally serving as its dean, and which had been directly exposed to terrorism until recently...
How could such a place have a spy? A demonfolk spy, no less.
That was what they called common sense. Something obvious.
* * *
“Why is there really one?!”
That was Eugene’s cry during the second week of Operation Name: Anyone Can Do It, One-on-One Date.
Footnotes:
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried