WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Hydrogen B

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

Chapter 21: The Status Window Opened on My First Day of School (5)

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* * *

There was a term called confirmation bias. It meant the tendency to selectively accept information that suited one’s own views.

In other words, once Enrika had started to suspect something, she could not stop. That was exactly where she stood now.

“That crazy bastard looks dangerous.”

Four days. For four days, he had been lying in wait, chewing on dry rations.

When Enrika first entered the assassination unit, she taught her disciples patience. No matter whether it rained or bugs landed on them, they were to remain still and observe their target.

That was not what she meant by it.

Unlike Enrika, who was a vampire, Ivan was human. Unlike her, who had no inherent weakness beyond avoiding sunlight and blessings, he had things necessary for survival. Besides, Enrika was an Elder who could endure the sun.

Sleep, food, rest. Basic things like that.

Enrika narrowed her eyes at Ivan, then let out a deep sigh.

At her age, being told to look after someone his age. The joke was downright vicious.

“Hey, disciple.”

“…”

Ivan stood like a statue without answering. He was concentrating so hard that he could not even detect her voice from this distance.

His eyes are moving. Is he lip-reading? He sure can keep at something exhausting for a long time.

Enrika shrugged and slipped a hand into her sleeve.

-Click. Bang!

She fired her pistol just like that. It was flawless, without a trace of wasted momentum. A steady diagonal shot aimed directly at the back of his head.

Ivan tilted his head aside, dodging it, then jumped down from the tree with an axe in hand.

“Enrika...?”

“Yeah, brat. Let’s get out of here first. Someone must’ve heard that shot, and who knows what annoying people will come sniffing around. Let’s go to your place.”

“Now’s a little inconvenient.”

“I’m much more inconvenienced. Elise will cry again if she finds out. I also want to take a look at your orphanage.”

Enrika grabbed Ivan firmly by the nape and dragged him along. Ivan glanced at her face, then put away his axe.

His Great Master was a frivolous woman and a little insane, but she was not one to talk nonsense.

So he would hear what was urgent. Ivan smoothly slipped free of Enrika’s arm and took the lead.

“It may be somewhat untidy.”

“Sure, sure. Let’s just go.”

* * *

A short while later, Enrika stepped into Ivan’s orphanage for the first time.

Her first impression was bewilderment.

“You’re not actually raising an assassination unit, are you?”

“That is a misunderstanding.”

“Really...?”

Enrika stared blankly around her. From tiny children to those nearly ready to graduate, kids of every age scampered about without making a single sound with their feet.

It was difficult to find discipline this strict even in her organization. What the hell had this bastard been doing? Enrika gave a hollow laugh.

“If you have a curriculum, share it with me. I couldn’t raise my kids like this even if I tried.”

“Provide a regular lifestyle and meals balanced for nutrition.”

“What kind of crazy nonsense are you talking about, you bastard?”

Enrika snorted and started walking again, only to stop once more.

“What’s that? Isn’t that one of the demonfolk?”

“That is correct.”

“Of all things...! You do know that if anyone finds out, you, him, and this whole place will die, right?”

“I know.”

Ivan shrugged. Far away, Aiphelos was teaching the children something.

One child came running over and drove a fist into Aiphelos’s side. It was an impressive feat. They had successfully ambushed a centurion who had spent roughly thirty years on the battlefield and landed a close-range strike.

“Yay!” the child shouted, then ran off again.

They vanished from sight in an instant.

“Everyone needs a chance to live like a human being.”

Enrika narrowed her eyes as she listened to Ivan. He had taken in demonfolk, yet his students were preparing to launch a surprise attack.

“We’re here.”

Ivan silently opened the door to the director’s office. It was dim inside, the curtains drawn.

Enrika took a step forward, then froze. A thin tripwire ran directly in front of her foot.

There were dozens of them. A single ray of sunlight filtering through the curtains revealed them like a spiderweb.

“What is all this...?”

Vampires could see in the dark even without light. Blackout curtains were not enough to hide an indoor space from her.

She could write off the booby traps as paranoid security measures.

But this...

“What have you really been doing with your life?”

Without a word, Ivan disarmed the traps. He undid each one attached to the wires, then touched the light fixture in the corner of the director’s office.

With a pop, the mana lamp came alive in blue light.

The room was a mess.

* * *

Dozens of stacks of documents. Profiles written in neat, densely packed handwriting. Notes bearing names, connected by red string.

Notes had been placed everywhere those threads tangled together like webs. When she read them one by one, they were ordinary lines of dialogue.

They were the kind of ordinary conversations that had no business being here.

Records of circumstances in which someone had spoken, expected speech patterns, meanings between the lines, inflections inferred from shifts in the tongue, lists of possible regions of origin based on those inflections...

Even when tracking an international criminal after receiving a red alert from the Counterintelligence Command, one would not go to such lengths.

And this was all for students.

Alone, without sleeping, for days on end.

Enrika’s face gradually hardened.

This situation, this appearance, this behavior. All of it was familiar to her.

These were traces of a certain mental illness. Something close to panic attacks, perhaps something that had been festering for even longer.

It sometimes appeared in people who had spent a long time rolling through battlefields. It was not all that rare.

But it was dangerous, like a ticking bomb.

Even now, Pritchenkaya was full of drug-addicted veterans wandering the streets in this state.

Enrika drew a deep breath.

“Ivan.”

“Mm.”

“Sit.”

Ivan’s expression remained blank. She could practically see the face he must have been making beneath that accursed beard.

Naturally, he did not feel that anything was wrong.

“When did you last sleep?”

“...I believe it has been six days.”

The last time he had fallen asleep, he had been having a nightmare among his folders.

It had felt truly terrible, and since then, he had deliberately avoided sleep. It was the sort of thing one might call superhuman willpower.

Enrika looked at him with bitter eyes.

“Tell me. What is all this? Until Dmitry asked me to keep an eye on you, I thought you were trying to protect those children.”

That conclusion had been natural, since it looked as though he was only following the Hero Party’s children. It had also been something to be grateful for. It meant he still worried about the children enough to act personally, even after retiring.

But the traces here said otherwise.

“Who are you trying to catch? A Saint Yansk University terrorist?”

“No.”

“Tell me. Just be honest. By now, I know you’re terrible with words. Start from the beginning, disciple.”

Enrika grasped Ivan’s hand tightly and looked quietly into his eyes.

A monster who had lived more than a century had the persuasiveness that came with the weight of those years.

Ivan met her earnest gaze, then sighed.

A moment later, he began to speak.

It was a grand confession.

* * *

Suppose, just suppose, there was someone like this.

Someone who left behind everywhere they had lived and everyone they knew, then suddenly fell into a world they had never seen before.

For example...

They liked a novel they had been reading so much that they stayed up all night, dozed off, and found themselves in the world of that novel in a dream.

No matter how hard they tried, they could not wake up. The world still felt like the story from that novel.

Because they did not want to die, or because they wanted to return home, they tried everything they could. Fortunately, they seemed to have talent, so they adapted and managed to live there.

After living through the novel’s final page, that person might begin to think this.

Why is it not ending?

Maybe there was another condition. Suppose they spent years watching the situation, considering whether suicide might be the most likely solution.

Then, in the middle of it all, someone suddenly appeared.

A stranger who might have come from the same hometown.

Now they would think this.

Was this world really nothing more than the setting of a novel? Were all the things I went through only a prologue? Would my name appear on a page of the novel that bastard read?

If it did, if that were true...

What sort of ending would await me? A tragedy? A comedy? No, before that.

Am I, and all my life, nothing more than a single line of backstory? Am I no more than a character preserved outside the story that is about to unfold?

Those were the thoughts he conveyed.

Increasingly disjointed, yet with eyes full of conviction, he looked directly at his master and continued.

He put as much consideration into it as possible, enough to make even this old-fashioned dinosaur understand.

* * *

“...So, to summarize... you’re actually a transmigrator.”

“Mm.”

“And you recently confirmed there’s another one.”

“Mm.”

“And you think you need to kill that person.”

“...Mm.”

“That’s very logical, disciple.”

Enrika sighed deeply and scrubbed at her face with dry hands. Leaning against the sofa, she stared at the ceiling for a moment.

Damn it, there were notes on the ceiling too. She could not even imagine how he had attached them.

“There’s a lot I want to say, but I should apologize first. I thought you had followed us all the way to the Demon King’s Tower.”

They had spent so much time together that she had naturally assumed he had climbed the tower with them.

It was Enrika’s mistake. In truth, it was everyone’s mistake. There was no point making excuses that they had not known what condition he was in. Taking him in as a disciple and leaving him alone was little different from abandonment.

“The Demon King’s Tower?”

“Yes. For some reason, we all thought of you as part of the same party, but when I think about it, you weren’t. We assumed you already knew, so we never bothered to mention it.”

Enrika paused, then shook her head.

“Max is not from Tilles.”

“Do you mean he has a different nationality? But...”

“No. Listen to me first. Max... Maximilian. He isn’t from this world.”

Enrika looked straight at Ivan and spoke as though biting off each syllable, as if she meant to carve the words directly into his mind.

“You’re not the first. You won’t be the last, either.”

* * *

She had used his convenient term, transmigrator.

But more precisely, they were not transmigrators. They were the Taken.

They were people who popped out of somewhere one or two at a time whenever the balance of the world tipped.

It was not common, but a few would always appear every century.

As though they had emerged to add a little spice to a chaotic world, they would suddenly show up, do something, then disappear.

Enrika knew people like that. She had even met a few herself.

Maximilian had been one of them.

He had been an ordinary man who missed his home, yet one admirable enough to head toward the battlefield.

That was why even she, a vampire, had followed him. He was that kind of man. He stood at the front and smiled, making everyone want to follow him.

A hero, the Hero, the Demon King Slayer, and an ordinary man. A lonely stranger until the end, now gone.

That was how Enrika remembered him.

A brave stranger who had drawn his sword to protect an ordinary commoner girl in Tilles who had taken him in.

“That’s why we don’t say the Hero was ‘born.’ We say the Hero ‘appeared.’”

* * *

Footnotes:

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