30 Years Have Passed Since the Prologue - Chapter 77

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Hydrogen B

Chapter 77: 12. Academy Festival Common Sense (7)

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"You'll relieve me... of my position?"

"You broke your oath of loyalty."

"An oath of loyalty?! Does this country still have any loyalty left to demand of me? No, that's not it. Ivan, even your loyalty... This country doesn't deserve our loyalty."

Ivan did not talk to madmen. He was a reasonable person.

His training had not included psychological counseling. Persuading and treating lunatics was the work of psychiatrists. There were none in this world.

He quietly raised the gun and aligned the sights.

One pistol. Twenty live rounds.

His opponent was a superhuman, and a well-trained one at that. Naturally, pistol bullets would not work on him.

Still, there was a reason pistols were part of the Annihilation Unit's standard equipment. Even in a situation like this, there were ways to use one.

"You have no intention of listening. Have you been brainwashed?"

"Pavel."

"Yes, you've finally decided to talk?"

"No."

Ivan spoke as he gauged the angle of Pavel's wrist around the spear shaft.

"We weren't taught to talk before a fight."

Pavel ground his molars together and glared at him.

Here it comes.

Without moving from where he stood, Ivan only twisted his wrist and shifted his aim.

The spearhead shot toward his head.

-Screeeech!!

With a roar that tore through the air, the spear said to have ripped open a dragon's throat lunged at him.

But Ivan knew its trajectory.

Watching the spearhead, he turned his wrist. The pistol pointed three inches ahead of its path.

There was no need to take careful aim. Within ten meters, Ivan's shooting did not even require him to consider his firing stance or his target's relative speed.

-Bang!!

-Kak!!

Sparks burst from the tip of the spearhead. Its path twisted, and the blade scraped through empty air before pulling back.

Naturally.

Even a 9mm pistol round carried roughly four hundred joules of kinetic energy. Forget complicated engineering calculations. Simply put, a bullet strike could easily twist the path of a spearhead.

Assuming it hit.

"What the...!"

He was shooting the spearhead to alter the attack's trajectory? It was no different from intercepting an incoming arrow with another arrow!

"Let's see how long you can keep this up!!"

Grinding his teeth, Pavel drew the spearhead back.

Yes, with extraordinary concentration, sharp eyes, and enough skill, it was possible.

But he could not keep it up forever. It was a technique that depended on luck and timing. A single inch of error, and the spearhead would rip through Ivan's throat without meeting any resistance.

Yet there was no fear in Ivan's eyes, even as he gambled with his life and danced on the blade's edge.

"Nineteen."

The number of rounds remaining.

It meant he could do it exactly once with each shot.

It was not a confident declaration.

He stated it as a simple fact.

Then Ivan took one step forward.

The distance was three meters.

His stride was always seventy-eight centimeters. Within four steps.

In that space, Pavel could make at most seventeen attacks.

That left more than enough room.

Ivan never hurried. He took a step, his eyes fixed on the spearhead and the wrist holding the spear.

Trying to evade Pavel's attacks would only introduce variables. So he entrusted the pistol, his sole means of defense, with protecting his body.

One step.

He left his body completely open, every inch of him exposed, and straightened his back as if inviting an attack at any moment.

"How dare you...!!"

-Swoooosh!!

-Click, bang!!

Sparks burst from the spearhead.

-Swish! Slaaash!!

-Click, bang, bang!!

A strike that swept upward at his waist. Another that drove down toward his thigh.

Their trajectories twisted, cutting through empty air before returning again and again.

One shot for each attack, always ahead of the exact path of a spearhead Pavel himself could not track with his naked eye.

Precise. Flawless.

This was not human skill.

Only then did Pavel remember.

"The Hero... Party's prowess...!"

"What are you talking about?"

-Click, bang!!

Five attacks came with Ivan's next step.

He struck every one of them with a precise shot and took another step.

"If even one member of the Hero Party had been here, you wouldn't still be standing."

Even Gilles Ver, who had been judged the weakest in raw combat power, though that was debatable, could have butchered Pavel in a single breath.

So this was nothing more than a desperate survival technique that second-line units like the Annihilation Unit had to learn, a way to fight superhumans when all they had left were small firearms like a pistol.

Pavel gave a hollow laugh, his face full of a madman's arrogance.

"Crazy bastard."

The initial ferocity was hard to find now. Ivan deflected three spear strikes with bullets and remained standing.

At last, four steps.

Even if Pavel retrieved the spearhead, there was not enough distance to form another attack. Seven bullets remained.

But Ivan no longer needed the pistol.

Against a superhuman, a pistol was a kind of armor. It was a tool used to defend against a superhuman's attacks.

So.

-Click.

"...?"

He threw away the pistol. It had fulfilled its purpose as armor for closing the distance.

Confusion crossed Pavel's eyes. Ivan looked at him from beneath lowered brows and slowly raised his fist.

Bullets did not lodge in a superhuman's body. Line-of-Fire Detection was an instinct that activated before anything else.

There was no need to announce his attack timing. In superhuman combat, even the momentary momentum between detection and firing was fatal.

-Hooh!

Ivan's fist cut through the air toward Pavel's blank face.

-Smack, smack!!

Pavel hurriedly struck Ivan's wrist to block the attack. Ivan had expected it. Spear techniques belonged to the realm of family secrets and had to be observed, but close-quarters hand-to-hand combat followed the standard military form.

Ivan had learned the same martial arts as Pavel.

He could predict the defensive forms that followed each attack trajectory.

Everything that could be predicted was no more than an external factor a trained agent could exploit.

-Thud, crack!

The first strike landed in Pavel's chest.

Pavel gasped and regained his stance. At some point, he had set down the spear shaft and begun answering with his fists.

Wise. At this distance, swinging a spear would only turn it into a staff.

Before Pavel could settle into his stance again, Ivan attacked once more.

-Thud!!

"Cough!!"

One strike to the chest, another to the waist, a palm shoving away the hand raised to block, then a fist driven into the opening and another to the jaw.

"Cough, hack!"

Air that could not become breath was forced from his lungs. His lungs, unable to absorb the impact, were beginning to fail him.

Ivan's eyes read Pavel's condition. He could infer what was happening inside his body, beyond its outward form.

His hearing and touch had become extraordinarily sharp in the realm of superhumans. The instant his fist landed, he could deduce what was happening in his opponent's body through the impact.

-Thud!!

The faint sound of bone breaking. A groan boiling up from within. The sensation of his opponent's muscles twisting, centered around Pavel's right upper arm as it slowly stopped functioning.

In the brief moment the blow numbed the nerves in Pavel's right hand, Ivan struck again before he could regain his stance.

-Thud!!

A blow to the jaw. In the brief shock caused by his head snapping back, the next strike came.

Pavel flailed. Ivan knocked aside the hand he raised to defend himself and slipped his fist in like a snake.

Then came more than a dozen clean strikes, layered one upon another.

-Thud, thud, thud!

"Urgh! Stop! Ngh...!!"

Pavel flailed his hands and staggered backward.

Ivan followed.

The fact that he could still speak meant he had not yet been completely disarmed.

He drove in another fist. A superhuman's body could itself be a weapon, so he could not let his guard down until Pavel was fully incapacitated.

Carelessness was the deadliest enemy an agent could face. Ivan had not been trained to be careless.

-Thud! Thud! Thud!

The accumulated impacts made Pavel's legs buckle. He staggered as he tried to keep his balance.

Which meant his lower body was open.

-Whoosh!

Ivan hooked his leg and brought him down, then climbed on top of him and seized his face.

He slammed it down.

-Bang!

Bang, bang!

Feeling Pavel's mouth convulse under his hand, Ivan smashed his head against the ground like he was hammering a nail.

Soon, blood covered his palm. Pavel, coughing blood from the repeated impacts, went limp as his strength gave out.

At last, Ivan had successfully incapacitated him. He shook the blood from his hand and stood.

-Click.

He picked up the pistol he had thrown aside and approached Pavel's head.

"The Great King...! Cough!! The Great King was murdered...!!"

Pavel spat out blood-tinged saliva and shouted.

Ivan stopped before raising the gun, then looked down at him.

"You still don't understand... Cough! Damn it! Don't you understand? The Great King... the Great King was murdered!"

"Yes. By the Seven Dragon Generals..."

"No!! This country wanted the Great King dead! You thickheaded fool!! You think they failed to obtain intelligence? Idiot...! The War Intelligence Bureau in Pritchenkaya...!! They did not fail to give us information. They chose not to give it to us!!"

Holding the pistol, Ivan took a moment to organize his thoughts.

The War Intelligence Bureau had been the predecessor of the Counterintelligence Command, the old military department responsible for foreign intelligence before the Annihilation Unit was founded.

It had not been an exceptionally capable organization, but it had not been incompetent either...

"Do you remember why the Great King had to take the field himself?"

"Because repeated defeats had shaken the royal authority..."

"Yes! Even if he could not become a victorious king, he needed to reclaim his authority as a king at war! The nobles of that time, those pig-like bastards, had been ready to abandon the Great King at any moment!"

Pavel shouted as if coughing up blood.

"Kiril... Kiril, that son of a bitch...! He wanted to restore the fallen royal authority with the majesty of the former king, who had died bravely in battle!!"

"..."

"The Great King was murdered. By the son he loved most! Even so, do you think this country still has the right to demand our loyalty? Ivan... Little Ivan!! Think of your name! You said you would demand that I answer for the price of betrayal!?"

Pavel staggered to his feet.

"Then let me ask you. What price will this country pay for its betrayal...?!"

Ivan unintentionally looked up.

A massive statue was looking down at him.

A statue of the former king, Ivan the Conqueror.

"It isn't too late, Ivan Petrovich. Take my hand. There are comrades who share my purpose."

Ivan slowly closed his eyes. Pavel's voice was stirring up his thoughts.

Ah.

The remnants of the demonfolk were taking root underground.

The royal family had betrayed the country and vanished.

The nobles of the fractured kingdom lurked beyond the cities, each nursing their own ambitions.

The member nations of the Allied Kingdoms no longer saw one another as allies.

It was a world of rival kings, ambitious plots, a nation exhausted by war, and rampant hunger.

Four years had passed since the Hero killed the Demon King.

Thirty years had passed since Ivan fell into this world.

Peace still meant no more than a joke. Perhaps it always would.

A king murdered by his son, and the seniors who had given their lives to protect him.

Countless conscripts who had raised weapons for one reason only, because they did not want demonfolk fangs to reach their families.

The foundation of this country, built atop their corpses, was still so precarious.

-I was a hypocrite all my life, so you too must live as one.

In that moment, the Great King's statue whispered to him.

In the final voice Ivan remembered from the Great King.

Hypocrisy, hypocrisy.

Ivan opened his eyes and looked around.

People were running. Fighting had broken out. People whose point of entry no one knew were attacking the festival-goers.

Within the slow-moving time, Ivan carefully looked around.

A festival.

Yes. This country had recovered enough to hold festivals.

The scent of grilling meat spread through the streets at least once a week.

Every morning, smoke from baking bread rose from chimneys across the alleys of Pritchenkaya.

It had become that kind of era. Even if conspiracies, schemes, invasions, and terrorism still lurked in the shadows of the city.

The war had ended, and the country was slowly coming back to life.

Just as the former king had wished.

Pritchenkaya was rising again.

-If enough lies gather together, won't they someday reach the truth?

Even if the view of this city, the expressions of women preparing meals, the faces of men leaving for work, and the smiles of citizens forgetting the war were all lies.

Even those lies were the very thing the former king had wanted all his life.

Perhaps the Great King had known of his son's betrayal. Perhaps he had believed it was for the best and accepted death with a smile.

There was no way to know.

But if there was one thing Ivan could be certain of.

As he had once reflected, the Great King would look down on the Pritchenkaya of today with satisfaction.

Injustice and corruption could be eradicated.

What mattered was seeing every citizen who lived in that city escape the threat of war and hunger, forget the war, and walk forward smiling, not just to live through another day, but toward tomorrow.

And so, the truth created by all that hypocrisy...

-Live, and carry on my hypocrisy. Will you promise me?

The thought of uprooting the malice lurking behind this country's shadows, so that the Great King's ideals would no longer be hypocrisy.

-Yes, Your Majesty. I swear it. I will do so without fail.

-That is enough.

The Great King's death, and our sacrifices, were not in vain.

That was enough.

"I believe you."

"Ivan...!"

"But I don't agree with your methods."

Ivan walked over slowly and grabbed Pavel by the collar.

"My loyalty still belongs to the Great King, Pavel. Your way will only make his death meaningless."