30 Years Have Passed Since the Prologue - Chapter 22

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Hydrogen B

Chapter 22: The Status Window Opened on My First Day of School (6)

──────

* * *

Maximilian had been a transmigrator. There were even more transmigrators.

Setting aside the fact that Ivan had never heard anything like that before, what had happened to them?

The Hero had vanished. He had secluded himself somewhere deep in the mountains of Tilles, leaving behind his wife and daughter.

No one could understand such a thing. Yet Ivan thought he might.

It was, it was...

‘Did he... go back?’

Ivan lowered his head, his face pale. Could he have returned? Was killing the Demon King the condition? Then what was Ivan’s condition...?

Smack!

His head snapped to the side as his vision flared white. The pain followed afterward. Ivan turned, feeling his stinging cheek.

Enrika was looking at him with sad eyes.

“Get ahold of yourself. I’m not finished talking.”

“...Enrika.”

“Yes. You recognize me. Good.”

Enrika sank deep into the sofa and sighed. This boy lacked sleep. No, he lacked rest. Now she finally understood why.

This was not trauma brought on by war. He was dissociated. He recognized this place as reality while wishing it was not.

Of course he could not have rested, not after spending all those long years alone. Every night, he must have chewed on his solitude, then suffered through that sense of wrongness every day.

Transmigrators. Wanderers dragged here from another world. Enrika pitied their kind. She pitied this quiet, twisted lunatic more than most.

Looking directly at her disciple, she slowly began to speak.

“They say everyone brought their own story with them. Only a few records remain, but that was true in most cases. Some spoke of stories, others of legends or myths, others of novels. Sometimes it was a play, and sometimes they described something else entirely.”

“...They were all different?”

“Yes. That means each of them had their own story.”

There was no common thread in what kind of stories had led them here.

Still, all of them felt as though they had fallen into a story they admired.

There was no way to know what occasion or method had caused it.

“What endings did they... the transmigrators... meet?”

This was the most important question Ivan carried within him. What ending awaited him?

“Some vanished again. Some died. Others remained.”

“And the Hero, Maximilian?”

“As you know, he went into seclusion. Who knows whether he returned in the meantime, or whether there was another reason? It’s not as though we can go ask him. We have no way of meeting him.”

Ivan lowered his head, dizzy.

Everyone had a different story, and everyone had a different ending. What would his be? Would he remain preserved in this world forever? Was there no way home? He wanted to believe death was not the only possible ending...

Bang.

Enrika struck the desk hard. When Ivan looked up, she was watching him with sad eyes.

“So what are we to you?”

“...What?”

“Are we nothing but side characters in a novel from your world? As you said, are we only ‘characters’ consumed as lines of writing?”

“That’s...”

“No. Of course not. How could that be?”

If there were ten thousand protagonists in a world where ten thousand stories intertwined, did each protagonist have to see the others as supporting characters?

No. That was not how it worked. They were all protagonists of their own stories. If so...

“Is your world fundamentally different from this one? Is that place reality, while this is only a fragment of a story? No. I’m alive. I breathe. I hate sunlight, I hate blessings, I drink blood, and I enjoy tea. I live as a real person, just like you.”

“Enrika...”

“You might be nothing more than someone’s supporting character? Don’t be ridiculous! You are the protagonist of your life, and I am the center of mine!”

Her eyes burned as if they could devour Ivan.

Ivan quietly looked at her face.

“You don’t want to be a supporting character? Then what did you think we were? What did you think of me? Ivan. Little Ivan. Did you live believing the late king you respected was no more than a supporting character in a story? Did you mock him in your heart while saying, ‘Do not mourn those who went before’?”

“No, I never...”

“Then live. Live your story, and finish your story. What ending that story reaches is not something fate or the world decides. You must decide it.”

Every story had its own ending.

The path leading to that ending was not necessarily determined by fate.

Even if the Hero Party’s journey remained a legend, each person in it was not some hero from a legend. They were simply individuals who still lived and breathed.

Enrika gripped Ivan’s hand tightly and looked at him with unwavering eyes.

“Do you want to return? To your hometown?”

“...Yes.”

“Then don’t wait until fate finishes your story, disciple. Turn its pages with your own hands. All the way to the end. To its conclusion.”

“At the end of it, will there be something I can decide?”

“The choice to turn the page is entirely yours. Just like everyone else. Just like every person in this world and yours.”

The Hero, Maximilian, always smiled. Smiling, he always took one more step forward.

Remembering those days when hope had been terribly scarce, Enrika thought quietly to herself.

That boy had missed home. He had missed the lover and parents he had left there. Whenever he spoke of his comfortable life and wondrous civilization, Enrika had pitied him.

A poor castaway. A dimensional wanderer. An outsider.

Yet the Hero smiled. He said ordinary meant the same thing in both that world and this one.

So he was not a castaway or an outsider. He was an ordinary person.

Carrying countless burdens on his shoulders, he took one more step forward. Then another, to achieve the ordinary life he believed in.

Step by step, toward the darkest hell on a continent where hope had vanished.

He stepped forward, willingly becoming a beacon for those without the courage to lead.

His courage lay in the ordinary and natural things he believed in. That was why he became the Hero. Not because of any privilege, talent, or qualification, but because he endlessly carried on the ordinary life he believed in.

To those who called that extraordinary, he would smile and say he was only doing what any of them could do.

“If I had met you just a little earlier... If I had listened more seriously to your story, it would not have come to this... I’m sorry, disciple.”

“Enrika...”

“I’ll stand watch. Get some sleep.”

“Stand watch?”

“I can tell from your condition. You couldn’t feel safe anywhere, so you probably couldn’t sleep properly. At least four years. If it has been longer, then perhaps your whole life.”

There was no bedroom anywhere in this room.

He must have only lain down on that desk or sofa and dozed lightly every time.

What if the protagonist of this world suddenly got rid of a supporting character? What if the story ended while he could do nothing? He had worried over such trivial things.

He treated others as supporting characters, yet stubbornly refused to let himself be one. Even so, he believed he could never be a protagonist.

“If you need me to, I’ll stand watch every night.”

Ivan did not refuse. He was too exhausted.

Kim Seonwoo quietly closed his eyes.

He had misjudged everything. This world was neither a strategy simulation nor a conventional heroic RPG. It might have been someone else’s story, but it was not his own.

He was not a soldier in a strategy simulation. He was not a scout in the Hero Party. Ivan Petrovich, Kim Seonwoo’s story had not even opened to its first page.

Thirty years had passed since the prologue.

Now the prologue of this story was over. Its name was not a genre. It was life.

Maybe it really was an academy story. Ivan gave a faint smile as he reflected on his situation.

That sentence no longer angered him.

He was too tired and worn out to be angry.

The hand patting his shoulder was warm.

He felt safe.

* * *

He was sixteen, and he had already spent two years being ground down on the battlefield.

Kim Seonwoo gritted his teeth and rolled across the ground. His issued sword had broken. He was out of bullets, and the demonfolk had finally broken through the defensive line.

When his sword broke, he scrambled across the ground for a spear. When the spear shaft snapped, he brought down a shield. He seized an axe, swung a greatsword, and held on.

Even he had never thought he could fight like this. He was more skilled at physical work than expected, and he did not tire easily.

Of course, the adrenaline surging through him probably made him forget his exhaustion for now.

Considering his athletic ability, he should have been too tired to stand long ago. Yet Ivan rolled across the ground and picked up a sword. He lifted a spear. He swung an axe and shoved with a shield.

How much time passed like that?

His body still moved. His vision was still clear. The only sounds he heard were his own breathing and the pounding of a heart that felt ready to burst. His nose had long forgotten every scent but blood.

He simply blocked, drove back, and struck down whatever approached him, surviving.

When silence finally arrived, Kim Seonwoo noticed the enormous shadow cast over him.

“You fought well.”

A deep voice rang out from above him. He looked up and saw a military banner. Krasilov’s military banner.

They were allies. Kim Seonwoo relaxed his shoulders and lowered his head.

The man was mounted, so he was someone important. Since he stood beneath the banner, he must have been a commander.

“What is your name?”

“I’m Ivan Petrovich, sir.”

“Your age?”

“Sixteen, sir.”

“Your position?”

“Conscript, sir.”

The man standing with the sun at his back had no visible face. The sunlight surrounding him like a halo was blinding.

“Turn around.”

Following the commander’s order, Ivan turned. He thought he was being told to return to the main camp.

So many corpses filled his vision that the ground itself was hidden. Countless bodies, demonfolk and human alike.

As Kim Seonwoo frowned, a gentle voice reached him.

“Raise your eyes. Look at those still standing.”

Only then did he see the others. Not corpses, but people.

Survivors. Wounded people who barely stood by leaning on broken spears, trembling yet alive somehow.

“This theater was meant to be lost. We had to commit our forces elsewhere.”

“Your Majesty!”

An attendant behind the commander let out a cry. The large man continued without concern.

“Yet they survived. Ivan Petrovich, look at those you saved. Stand tall. You saved them. You saved the villages behind them. You saved their families somewhere beyond this place, and the people living in those villages.”

The commander jumped down from his horse and stroked Ivan’s head. His hand was large.

“So stand tall, Little Ivan.”

“...I’m not little.”

He was taller than the average person of this era. Even the officer who drove conscripts into battle might have mistaken him for an adult.

“When this king was your age, I fought like you and earned the name Ivan the Great. Surely you cannot presume to be called by the same name as your king?”

“Your Majesty!”

The attendant shouted again. The big man gave Ivan’s back a pat, then climbed back onto his horse.

“Treat that child. Teach him.”

“Will you take him in?”

“I would sooner raise a lion in a zoo. Make a place for him. If he rises to a position where he can stand on his own, will we not meet him again?”

He met that man again five years later.

Five years later, he joined the Royal Guard.

After that, he was known as Little Ivan. It was a deeply honorable title.

* * *

Ivan did not have a nightmare that night.

The late king he saw for the first time in a long while was as splendid as ever, so Ivan could sleep deeply.

* * *