WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Hydrogen B
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
Chapter 7: Terrorism Always Occurs on the Academy Entrance Train (5)
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* * *
“Urgh... Ngh... Ghk...”
“It’s fine. You won’t die.”
“Just kill me...”
“Don’t say that.”
Ivan whispered kindly as he poured potion over Hugo’s body.
Whenever the viscous, cold liquid touched him, Hugo flinched and let out a small scream.
Ivan knew exactly how the man felt. One of the things most soldiers who had served on the front lines hated most was healing potion. It ranked after military rations, seniors, commanders, generals, and the enemy army, which should tell anyone all they needed to know.
He had experienced it himself when his arm had nearly been torn off and he had been forcibly given a healing potion.
“Just cut the arm off instead!! Aaaagh!!”
“Don’t say that, Sir Petrovich. Your body is a treasure of our nation!”
“Who treats a treasure like this?!”
That had happened when he was still young and inexperienced. After that horrific experience, Ivan had done his best to avoid suffering major injuries.
Healing potions hurt about as much as a particularly vicious medicine he could only remember by digging through his memories of life as Kim Seonwoo. Its name was Albothyl, that cursed topical treatment.
Thanks to that, Ivan had discovered a new use for healing potions during his time in the Annihilation Unit.
A healing potion hurt like pouring salt into a burn.
But it always healed the wound.
That meant an interrogation could continue while treating injuries inflicted during the interrogation.
It was truly sustainable interrogation. His fellow agents in the Annihilation Unit had been horrified by the idea. Sadly, there was no Geneva Convention in this world, so prisoners had no human rights.
“N-no more... I don’t... I don’t know anything else...! Really... I swear... so stop...”
“You’re more useless than I expected.”
“Spare me... No, kill me...”
“No. You need to live.”
Because he was the tutorial boss.
Glug, glug.
Ivan poured the potion again to silence the man, then stood.
The criminal organization that had hired this man to carry out the train bombing consisted of adult men in thick coats, their faces obscured by a Recognition Suppression spell.
It was January. Of course adult men were wearing thick coats.
He could not even identify their nationality from their speech or accents. Ivan had failed to account for the possibility that this country bumpkin could not tell such things apart.
A waste of effort.
Clicking his tongue, Ivan looked around. The train was still quiet. That was not a bad sign.
‘Princess Aesidis is still fighting.’
If Princess Aesidis had been defeated, bandits would have come pouring out of the train. They had failed to find the gold bars, but they would have gained an expensive noble hostage instead.
The fact that no one had emerged from the train yet was proof that Aesidis was safe.
Ivan had just risen to head for the train when, in that instant, Line-of-Fire Detection sent a fierce warning through his brow.
His brow?
No, his entire face.
Whoooosh!
The air split.
KABOOOM!!
A boulder flew in like a cannonball, skimming past the spot where Ivan had been standing.
Ivan sprang away from the next line of fire. Bang, bang, bang! Boulders struck precisely where he had been.
“Come out.”
Someone who could throw like that was stronger than expected.
Which meant the opponent likely possessed Line-of-Fire Detection as well.
Since it was obvious this would have to become close combat, the other side would have to show themselves eventually.
“The boss really is a monster!!”
Had he dismissed the words of a mere lackey who could not use line-of-fire detection too easily? Was this man not the boss? Then he had wasted precious potion.
Ivan glared coldly at the man approaching from afar.
“You’re a capable one.”
A middle-aged man with a solid body packed with muscle strode closer, growling.
Terrifying bloodlust swept over Ivan, enough to make his whole body tingle.
“But to dare think of harming my niece. You’re a fool for someone with your ability.”
Niece? Was that man’s relative? What a nuisance.
Clicking his tongue, Ivan holstered his pistol and gripped an axe in each hand.
“I hope you know something.”
“Bullshit... Come on, then. I’ll kill you.”
The man ground his teeth and raised his axe.
The next instant, the two men collided.
* * *
Whoooong! Crack!!
Aesidis gritted her teeth at the sound of her violin’s fingerboard twisting.
“Hang in there a little longer, Kkangkkang!”
Violins were not made for bludgeoning people. Most instruments were not. Electric guitars were the exception. They were perfected by smashing them against the stage.
So every time Aesidis swung her arm, the delicate wooden string instrument slowly broke apart. Its top plate cracked, and its fingerboard warped.
Yet Kkangkkang, Violin the Second, did not let its memories and friendship with Aesidis go to waste.
Whenever Kkangkkang swung, something else broke too.
Usually an adult man’s skull.
“C-crazy bitch!! What the hell is she?!”
“Where are the gold bars?! Hey! What happened to the cargo car?!”
“There’s nothing in there!! We were tricked!”
The bandits wanted to run. There were no gold bars, the army would obviously pursue them after they blew up the train, and the madwoman in front of them was beating people to death with a violin.
Aesidis wanted to run too. She could clearly feel Kkangkkang’s life fading with every passing moment. Fighting frightened her, and she did not even know where she was.
Thwack!
Crunch!
Kkangkkang harvested another bandit’s teeth, and finally reached the end of its life.
Holding the remaining fragment of the violin’s fingerboard, Aesidis groaned in despair.
“Kkangkkang... You were a wonderful instrument...”
“Crazy bitch, crazy bitch!!”
“Shouldn’t we run? This isn’t the time to fight!”
“Damn it, do you think she’ll just let us leave?”
“Argh! What the hell is Big Brother doing?!”
Unaware that Big Brother was caught between a monstrous old muscleman and a Special Operations Unit officer, the bandits murmured among themselves and slowly backed away.
That was a mistake.
The daughter of Einar the Slaughterer took after her mother in many ways, but her anger, fighting spirit, and skill at combat came entirely from her father.
To Droan warriors, comrades were sworn siblings. She could not let the death of her longtime comrade Kkangkkang, an instrument just two years old, be meaningless.
With a gentle hand, she stroked Kkangkkang’s remains, then slowly straightened.
“Kkangkkang, I won’t forget your sacrifice. Thank you for everything, and I’m sorry.”
“I’ll hold off that crazy bitch. You run.”
“Big Brother!!”
“Go! At least you lot need to make it out alive!”
At the bandit’s shout, the remaining stragglers turned and fled at once. With tears welling in their eyes, they ran toward the main camp where Big Brother should have been.
After watching them go, the bandit turned to Aesidis with a resolute expression.
“You misunderstand, my lady.”
“...Huh?”
“We had no idea you were on this train. But if you spare us, I’m willing to testify in court. Krasilov is a country governed by the rule of law, isn’t it? Please spare me!”
The bandit threw down his weapon, fell to his knees, and shouted. It was a wise decision.
The bandits who had fled were, at that very moment, sweating coldly between an enraged Huscarl and an enraged Annihilation Unit officer.
* * *
“You think bringing a few more lackeys will change anything?!”
“...There are many survivors. But it changes nothing.”
The two men, who had been hacking at each other with axes, shouted at once as they saw bandits running from the train.
“Aesidis, what happened to the woman who was on that train? There should have been a young blonde woman. Is she safe?”
“My niece!! Is she safe?!”
Ivan paused at the man’s cry.
Wasn’t that man over there the relative he meant?
Ivan glanced at the man who had been struck unconscious by a fragment during the fight, then groaned.
No wonder it had been so difficult.
For an early tutorial, the man before him was far too well-designed a boss.
Ivan had wondered if he was one of those Soulslike bosses designed to stop people from getting refunds, but even then, he had too many patterns. There was no way a beginner could defeat him.
Which meant...
‘A train attack in an academy story can never kill the protagonist. A helper appears and saves them.’
This man had been the helper.
And the tutorial boss battle had probably been designed to teach the player how to fight multiple opponents by taking down several escaped lackeys and a weak boss.
Ivan sighed and put away his axes. Their edges were badly damaged, so he would have to throw them out. Weapons were mostly consumables anyway, but it was still a shame.
“Um, wait. You aren’t with them...?”
“I don’t know why you got that impression.”
The man narrowed his eyes as he put away his weapon too.
“You were pouring healing potion on that bastard.”
“Ah.”
Explaining that it was the Annihilation Unit’s interrogation method would be excessive. There was no way to convince him anyway.
Ivan shrugged.
“I had something to find out.”
“Tch. You should’ve said that first.”
The man had not given him time to explain.
As Ivan looked at him with an awkward expression, the man saw the woman bounding cheerfully out of the train and broke into a broad smile.
“Niece!! Esi!! You’re safe!!”
“Blegh, Uncle?!”
Ignoring the man as he ran off, Ivan glanced at the bandits, who were terrified by the area wrecked as though a bomb had exploded, then clicked his tongue.
The target was safe, and the helper had enough ability to protect the target until she arrived at Saint Yansk University.
Ivan himself was someone who could not let the target see him. His identity would cause problems if exposed, and Aesidis knew him.
It had been seven years ago, in the distant past, and Aesidis had only been a little girl in her mid-teens then. Still, she might remember Ivan.
He had obtained all the information he could here. Ivan turned and withdrew.
* * *
Aesidis, eldest daughter of Berserker Einar.
Arrived in Krasilov.
One Droan dispatch agent, presumed Huscarl, deployed.
Target safety secured.
After sending a brief encrypted telegram with urgent notice to the East Court, Ivan boarded a train headed for the capital.
It had been an exhausting day for such meager gains.
* * *
“Esi, do you happen to remember a man named Ivan?”
“Mr. Ivan?! Of course I do!”
Aesidis brightened at the welcome name, then soon lowered her head gloomily.
“He was such a wonderful person... Kind, and cool...”
“I’m not so sure about that, but anyway.”
The man frowned as he walked.
Five or six terrified bandits carried an improvised palanquin made from a torn-off train door.
Careful not to let Aesidis hear from atop the palanquin, the man muttered quietly.
“I heard he died two years ago.”
His fighting style had seemed familiar, and it was exactly like the Krasilov Special Operations Unit.
And the way he used axes felt strangely familiar too, much like Elder Brother Einar’s axe work.
There was only one Krasilov man who had learned axe fighting from Einar.
Hero Reserve Ivan Petrovich.
More precisely, Ivan Petrovich of the Hero Reserve. He had been one of those considered fit to join the Hero Party if it suffered a vacancy.
That man had supposedly died together with one of the Seven Dragon Generals during the extermination campaign that followed the Demon King’s death.
The thick beard, the shadowy woods, and his vision clouded by rage had kept him from getting a proper look at the other man’s face.
Still, he appeared to be one of the royal intelligence organization’s men. If he operated in the capital, they would meet eventually.
He would make him shave then.
The capital was a week away on foot.
The two new students of Saint Yansk University began their crossing by train-palanquin!
* * *
Footnotes:
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