30 Years Have Passed Since the Prologue - Chapter 69

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Hydrogen B

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

Chapter 69: 11. St. Yansk University and the Chamber of Secrets (12)

──────

* * *

Ivan sat on the sofa and stared at the bed for a while.

Then the bed wriggled, and the blanket slipped softly down.

Blond hair spread out like a wheat field, with sleek ears jutting up between the strands. It was Elphihara.

“Oh? You’re awake? Did you sleep well?”

Ivan quickly looked Elphihara over. She was properly dressed in silk pajamas. Relieved inwardly, he set down his dagger.

“Why am I here?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Mm.”

“Hmm... Hehe, is that so? That’s what you’re saying?”

Elphihara chuckled to herself and crawled out of bed.

She glanced mischievously at the clothes strewn on the floor and asked, “What do you think we did?”

“Nothing.”

Ivan was a trained intelligence operative. That did not mean he trusted his own self-control. It meant he could gather more than enough information just by looking at the condition of someone’s clothes and body hair.

If he had done something while asleep, Elphihara would not have looked that immaculate.

Feeling his gaze on her, Elphihara stuck out her lips and grumbled.

“We really didn’t do anything, but it’s not like we did absolutely nothing.”

“...What?”

“The Saintess came by.”

Still sulking, she clapped once.

A moment later, the door opened and an attendant came in, setting refreshments across the table.

With a casual wave, she sent the attendant away again, then picked up a teacup filled with black tea.

“Eat something. You must be starving.”

“Where is my Nutrient Bar?”

“Huh? What’s that?”

“The one that was in my vest. I had it tucked into the slit.”

“Uh... You mean the dog chew? I gave it to Lord Mont Blanc, but he wouldn’t eat it, so I thought it had gone bad and threw it away... Th-that was for people?”

“Lord Mont Blanc...?”

“My dog. He’s cute. Want to see him?”

Ivan looked at the gaudy finger foods laid out on the table and forced down a sigh.

Food like this, made of nothing but sugar and carbohydrates, was pathetic. It offered more calories than necessary and less nutrition than necessary.

He was about to say something about tossing a complete-meal Nutrient Bar to a dog, but instead he picked up his teacup and organized his thoughts.

There was something more important than that. He could get as many Nutrient Bars as he wanted from the director’s office. What mattered now was the current situation.

He was, after all, such a rational and magnanimous person.

“You said the Saintess came.”

“Oh, right. Yes. She checked on your condition. Oh, right! Seriously, why did you say nothing happened?!”

Elphihara slammed her teacup down with a crack and burst out angrily.

Trying to follow the emotions of an adolescent girl, not that she actually was one, would have been both difficult and foolish, so Ivan simply listened in silence.

“The curse! The Saintess stayed up all night dismantling it. What in the world was all that?”

“Unhappiness.”

Ivan shrugged as if it were nothing.

“Did the Saintess say anything?”

“Not in detail.... She just came in, cried for a long time, prayed all night, and left. She only told me to tell you to come to the confessional three days a week.”

“That was within the expected range.”

Ivan took a sip of tea, then rose from his seat.

“That thing dealt in the concept of happiness, so the side effects its death throes left behind were predictable. A lack of happiness is unhappiness.”

“Uh... Uh, then... about as bad as that trap...?”

A curse that poured out the same volume of unhappiness as the overwhelming happiness that had seized her spirit the moment she saw it?

Elphihara swallowed as she remembered what Ivan had looked like when he came out of that room.

“I was planning to do that anyway. This university has the Saintess, and the Saintess is the most skilled person on this continent when it comes to lifting curses.”

“...You expected all of that?”

“Mm.”

“You really... You really must be insane!! Then you should have said something! What if we’d waited for you to wake up instead of going straight to the Saintess? What then?!”

“What then? If it had been an urgent kind of curse, I would have spoken first. A curse that merely inflicts unhappiness is not life-threatening, so there was nothing urgent about it.”

“You...!!”

Elphihara shouted with tearful eyes.

“You’re strange. You’re really strange. I thought maybe you were just a bit like this because you’re human, but why have you changed so much? You weren’t like this before!”

“I wasn’t?”

“That’s right! You used to be...!”

“You’re overstepping.”

Ivan got dressed and put himself in order. After quickly checking his gear, including his utility vest and his self-made sling bag, he turned his head.

“Elphihara. Your job is not to worry about me.”

“Wh... what?”

“You’re a student. Your role is to learn well, and to do things like this sort of... field study every now and then.”

For the children of the Hero Party, the next Hero Party, the ones who would become the protagonists of the scenario to come, nothing mattered except experience and learning.

Therefore, everything else belonged to Ivan.

These kids would reach the ending, safely and flawlessly clearing the scenario before finally facing the ending credits.

That process would be his story. The final page of it was probably, and certainly, there.

So his own safety, the safety of the Hero Party’s children, the threats outside the scenario, none of that was anything these kids needed to think about or worry over.

That was his responsibility. And Ivan was a selfish man, so he disliked other people lending a hand in his assigned work.

He gave a short nod of farewell to the blankly staring Elphihara, then left the room.

So this was where the elves lived.

Ivan walked on, squinting in the bright midday sun.

Right beside the university was an outrageously luxurious street. Commonly called the elves’ dormitory district, it was a residential quarter where nobles from Kallion gathered to live.

Ignoring the elves who stole glances at him, he walked straight toward the university.

He could rest when it was time to rest, but reporting came first.

He cast one last look at Elphihara’s mansion and felt a brief pang of regret.

He had not needed to snap at her like that. It may have been rather harsh to say to a kid.

But it was not easy. The curse had probably all been lifted, but memories did not vanish even under the Saintess’s blessing.

The memories of the past stirred up by the curse of unhappiness had vividly dragged back even the trivial things he had forgotten over the years, forcing raw emotion on him exactly as it was.

The North Wind and the Sun.

Ivan gave a bitter smile.

It seemed he was a traveler more vulnerable to the North Wind than the Sun.

As he had reflected, over the years he had spent in this world, all happiness had exhausted its lifespan, and the only thing left on this land was duty.

To explain it another way, the absence of happiness was unhappiness.

Which meant that most of the past he could recall was filled with unhappiness.

He had only managed to escape after staying alone in that room and enduring thirty years of unhappiness.

The memories that had been forgotten for a while after he blacked out were resurfacing through that conversation and gnawing at Ivan’s emotions.

Not very mature.

Ivan decided he would apologize to Elphihara someday, then turned his steps away.

* * *

-Clack.

Elphihara sniffled as she stared at the closed door for a long while after it shut with that dry sound.

That human from those days, now changed into someone unfamiliar.

The swift, brief life of a human.

The temptation of happiness and the curse of unhappiness.

Kindness and wounds.

The words tangling through her head gradually sharpened into clear pieces and began to fit together.

She was a mage. Mages were the sort of people who had to look at a situation with reason rather than emotion.

So, half out of professional calling and half out of a habit carved in by long years, she regained her composure.

-Rattle.

She drank the cooled tea and narrowed her eyes.

‘A trap that tempts the target with what they want most.’

The trap she had encountered in the ruins had shown her gold and jewels, all kinds of rare grimoires, and reagents so valuable they would be hard to obtain even with a fortune.

And what that man had encountered was...

‘A comb.’

She thought about how that could be possible. The conclusion was simple. At that time, that was all he wanted.

Rather than meaning he liked combs to a bizarre degree, which was partly true, it meant he had nothing else he wanted, not even more than that.

‘He has no desires.’

Elphihara’s eyes flashed sharply.

The greatest beauty in Kallion had been right beside him, and even with an elf of practically mythical beauty standing there in front of him, he had thought of a comb instead of an aphrodisiac. That was proof enough.

Elphihara nodded at this perfectly sound conclusion.

‘He’s broken.’

This proved that even if the reasoning was wrong, there was no problem as long as the conclusion was right.

Did the Saintess know? What about her father? If they, the people who had once been that man’s comrades, had not noticed, and if she alone in this world knew such a fact...

‘I have to do it.’

Elves were, by nature, faithful to their desires. That did not mean they indulged in vulgar pleasures. It was simply the perfectly natural logic that if something was precious, it ought to belong to an elf.

After all, you could not leave something precious in the hands of rash short-lived folk and let it be damaged.

So Elphihara, as one excellent elf, reached her conclusion.

‘There’s no one but me.’

Teaching happiness to a man who did not know happiness would be quite thrilling.

Just as dogs had different lifespans depending on the breed, that man seemed to have been born with an especially short lifespan, even for a human.

First she would restore his lifespan and make that appearance of his a little younger, then improve his constitution regularly, and feed him something better than that dog chew. Yes. If she took him in like that, he would naturally feel happiness.

Smiling, she gently lifted the tiny poodle panting at her feet and stroked it.

* * *

“You encountered what in the ruins?”

“I encountered something that claimed to be a god. It was impossible to determine its true identity under the circumstances at the scene, but I will consult the Saintess and attach that consultation to the report.”

“No, no, no. I don’t understand.... A trap? Magic? A seal from two thousand years ago?”

“Yes.”

Elizaveta clutched her forehead and muttered.

“Why in the world would something like that be beneath the university...? Why was it never even mentioned in the royal archives? If something like that was sleeping beneath the capital, then I... this country should have known....”

“...”

Ivan did not feel any need to explain the concept of common sense to these medieval people.

Ancient evil sealed beneath the capital was a matter of common sense.

“All right, so... how did you destroy it?”

“At best, all it could do was toy with human desire.”

“Oh, that’s rather... epic. To hear a story like this in an age after the Demon King is dead. Are you all right? You weren’t hurt?”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

Still kneeling on one knee, Ivan continued.

“It had no ability to exert physical force.”

“I see. Then would you tell me how you destroyed it?”

“I smashed its head.”

“...???”