WeTried Translations
Translator: Botanica
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◈ Academy's Pure Love Dark Knight ◈
Chapter 113
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Episode 113. The Unmelting Heart of the North.
* * *
There's something the gigolo bastard once told me. Something he said over in-game voice chat while we were running a raid.
"Hey, Saintess fetishist. You made it?"
"Why'd you invite me to fight the Demon King of Harmlessness? I already cleared out all the rewards here."
The place I entered after receiving the invite held the Demon King of Harmlessness, the very first boss to appear in <Black Heart>.
A demon king in the shape of an ash-grey knight.
It looked like it couldn't hurt you at all, functioning almost like a tutorial, the first hint of what kind of authority a demon king actually wielded.
"I just found a new gimmick a second ago."
"This thing already poisons you without you even noticing. There's more to its gimmick than that?"
The authority of Harm, the exact opposite of Harmless.
A demon king that sprayed a colorless, odorless poison players couldn't detect, then, once the poisoning wore off, slammed them with a sudden damage-over-time tick that shredded their health.
Because it was an authority, you had to block it with an artifact or a Masterpiece, and it didn't even register as a status-ailment debuff.
It was because of things like this that I'd made it a habit to always figure out a demon king's authority first before fighting it.
"Right, hurry up and bring out the chess pieces, Black Knight."
"Yeah, this is exactly why the gigolo bastard's no good. It's become a total habit."
I brought out the transparent chessboard and pieces made of crystal. Normally, you could clear it just by lopping its head off right away, but
"I've played chess before too, you know. I've even won."
"If it were something that simple, I wouldn't have called you. Who do you think I am?"
To get the extra hidden rewards, you had to play a game against the demon king like this and win. Games that pitted intellect against intellect, like chess or janggi, its Korean cousin, worked especially well.
"..Right, self-proclaimed greatest mind in the North."
Apparently the reason was something about the Demon King of Harmlessness being a hero chosen by Akasa, the God of Wisdom, or so I'd read once in an interpretation post on the game community boards.
"Suhyun, what do you think matters most in a game?"
The gigolo bastard let the demon king move first, and the Demon King of Harmlessness, without any reply or change in expression, began moving its white pieces.
"..Isn't it memorizing patterns?"
"Sure, you're not wrong either. You play everything on raw mechanics without much sense for it, after all."
Tak. The gigolo bastard answered with a black piece of his own to match it.
Unlike me, the man with the striking white hair and red eyes sat back in his chair, keeping an easy, relaxed air about him.
"More than that, I think reading your opponent matters most, Suhyun."
"Don't tell me...."
Even while talking to me without so much as glancing at the board, he kept catching his opponent off guard.
"You memorized this thing's every pattern?"
"Hey, there's a limit to winging it the way you do. This is exactly why knight classes are like this."
Click, click. Black and white pieces traded places back and forth as if seizing each other's ground, but unlike the gigolo bastard, whose pace barely shifted from the start,
"Everyone's got their own distinctive way of playing."
The Demon King of Harmlessness's thinking time kept stretching longer and longer, all while it kept trying to game-over Northern Grand Duchess's Husband with its authority.
Whether it sprayed poison unconsciously or on purpose, I couldn't say, but it really was a strange demon king. It never resorted to anything as direct as swinging a blade around.
"Like whether it moves a pawn first, or a knight?"
"Exactly. Though you're afraid of people."
But he pulled an hourglass out of his inventory, just to shut down even that kind of stalling.
"At least I don't do that."
When the gigolo bastard flipped the hourglass over, the sand trickling down made a soft rustling sound.
"For instance, you know what the first thing our Grand Duchess ever did to me was?"
"What, say 'nice to meet you'?"
I said it thinking of Phine's first line to me back when she was the Saintess, but he shook his head and laughed. If she didn't even greet him, then what did she do?
"No, she invited me to dinner and tried to poison my character to death."
"What..? You're lying, right?"
The situation had turned completely in his favor by now. With even a time limit imposed, the demon king's play grew predictable. As the match edged closer to its end,
"She's a total firecracker, our Grand Duchess."
Countering the monotonous attacks while gradually closing in on the white king, the white-haired man's movements began to turn strange.
"Actually, rulers would normally purge an enemy outright or dismantle their power base rather than let them stand, or...."
I couldn't make sense of the gigolo bastard trading queens like that. Wait, why make that move now? That'd put him at a disadvantage.
"...or else win them over to their own side. One of the two."
Tak. Instead, he kept his knight alive and kept firing off checks in some strange pattern. Was he going for checkmate?
"Well, I dressed it up a little with that analogy, but that's basically how it works out, Lee Suhyun."
Tuk, with one last rook move, he drove his opponent's king into a corner.
At that instant, the demon king's hand froze. What? Wasn't it out of check? Curious, I looked carefully over the gigolo bastard's chess pieces.
"Stalemate. Winning outright isn't always what matters."
The moment he said that one short word, he rose from his chair, and the demon king's movements stopped dead, as if the whole encounter were already over.
A stalemate is when the king would die by moving, even though it isn't currently in check.
In other words, unless it moved its own king to kill itself with its own hand, there was no other way forward.
"In this case, since it's chess, it looks like a draw, but-"
No matter how you ran every possible outcome, the Demon King of Harmlessness had no move left besides a draw.
Because under the rules, a situation like that counted as a draw, not a loss.
"In an actual fight, it'd have no choice but to kill itself or switch to my side. Doesn't that sound exactly like our Grand Duchess's personality?"
The player under the nickname Northern Grand Duchess's Husband, driving the point home with a victory-sign emoticon on top of it all.
"..You've got it bad too. I really shouldn't end up living like that."
"Says the guy who can't even land a happy ending or make any headway with that Saintess of his. You sure talk a big game."
Click, from behind the chair the demon king had been sitting in, came the sound of a locked treasure chest unlocking.
"You seriously need to try actual dating sometime. You eunuch bastard who doesn't understand the first thing about how women think."
"Fine. Kwon Gi-seok."
He gave the contents inside a quick once-over, then shut the chest again. Guess the reward he'd been hoping for hadn't shown up.
"Oh, and don't go reading people in black and white. You'll get burned."
"Where's this coming from all of a sudden."
Gi-seok changed the subject and said it like he was scolding me. Why the sudden lecture?
"Do you happen to remember Forbidden NTR Knight?"
"Of course I remember."
That's the guy who kept telling me to ditch our Saintess's route for a harem or NTR route instead, and said things too foul to even repeat, the one I'd kicked out of the guild before.
"He posted on the community boards saying it wasn't fair."
"That guy already creeped me out with a nickname so close to mine.. and now he's taking it even further?"
"No, that's not it."
When I clicked the link he'd sent, there was a post claiming he admired me so much he'd picked a similar nickname and made one joke, never expecting it would get him banned.
"Turns out this guy was only ever like that in his nickname and how he talked. Just playing a part."
"..What? No way."
Gi-seok showed me the ending record listed on the player card.
"Here, look, the player card. See it with your own eyes. You seriously need to fix that temper of yours."
A player card listed everything, the owner's routes taken, endings, achievements, class type, all of it,
"You should've realized it was contradictory for someone like that to even join our single-character guild in the first place. Honestly, no sense of awareness at all."
It was also something I checked ahead of time whenever picking people to bring into the guild. Couldn't let a scammer or a hacker slip in, after all.
"He really never got a single harem or NTR ending..?"
"Right, he was actually a recruit I picked out myself in the first place. His mouth's foul, sure, but he's got skill."
"Did you really have to bring in someone that weird, of all people? Gi-seok?"
But he was the bastard who told me to build a harem around our Saintess. That crossed a line, didn't it?
"Same knight class as you, too. Figured he'd be useful when you went looking for a strategy to take down Magic Hat, so I picked him. Satisfied?"
"Then you should've just told me."
"Now who was it that banned him before I even got the chance to explain~? Beats me."
I'd abused my authority as guild leader, so admittedly, that had been a bit much.
I was usually level-headed, but the moment anything touched our Saintess, I turned into someone else entirely.
"Even thinking it over again, the ban was too far, Suhyun. You could've just challenged him to a one-on-one duel and beaten him with your own hands."
He grabbed the spear strapped to his back and swung at my character. PVP was switched off, so the blow just cut through empty air.
"Anyway, next time, actually look at who a person really is. Pure Love Black Knight."
"Fine, I got it. You Grand Duchess's-husband bastard."
As I sighed and admitted I was wrong, Northern Grand Duchess's Husband handed the reward item over to me.
"Huh..? You're giving this to me? The thing that came out of the stalemate reward?"
"You really have no cl-.. never mind. I'm off to hit the gym now."
Saying the gym would be opening any minute, he logged off, the gigolo bastard whose real name was Kwon Gi-seok.
His character had that classic broody, main-character-syndrome look to it, white hair and red eyes included, but,
"..."
he was, plain and simple, the friend who'd always given me advice whenever things got hard, who'd enjoyed the game together with me. Coming to the North, the thought just crossed my mind out of nowhere.
* * *
Don't think of people in black and white.
'What you thought was black might really be white. A game doesn't always have to be won....'
Turning that saying back over in my head, I thought carefully about what Phine had just done, and let myself entertain, just a little, the idea that she might actually like me.
'No way. Does she like me?'
After all, love wasn't really an emotion that split cleanly into like and dislike, and it wasn't something anyone else's interpretation or explanation could make you understand, either.
'Right. Later, when I get the chance, I should at least ask Phine how she really feels about me.'
There still wasn't much to go on, admittedly. But anyone could see she treated me differently from everyone else,
"Phine, please keep some distance."
"..No. I'm staying right by your side, Licht. The North's too cold."
The distance between Phine Gransia and me had grown far too close ever since our decisive battle with Ache, so there was some need to put a little space between us.
"You could just use a warming spell."
"Nn, don't pet my tail.. Licht.."
"Phine, even so, we need to keep our distance once we're in front of Asha."
At this rate, it might end up causing problems for the Grand Route. At the very least, it wouldn't be too late to start worrying about my own affection level once I'd taken down every demon king.
Because more than anything, Phine Gransia's happiness came first to me.
"Otherwise, it'll be hard to help Senior Nex and Senior Chartiness."
"..Fine, Licht."
Once I played that card, she let her tail loosen and hid her cheeks behind her hair. Her face had gone so red it looked ready to start steaming.
"Ugh.. such a pervert.."
Just what did a tail even mean to beastfolk, to get a reaction like that? Back when she was the Saintess, she only seemed startled for a moment before enjoying it whenever I touched hers.
"We're almost there, so mind your conduct from here on, Licht."
That's probably why I never thought much of it. Though I do remember her disliking it whenever I stroked against the grain.
"Phine, I understand we have a special sort of relationship, but we still need to keep public and private separate."
Inside the palace, following behind the Northern Grand Duchess.
As the door deeper inside the building swung open, I saw a woman with golden hair seated within.
"Welcome. Drake, and... Princess Phine?"
Seeing the golden phoenix crest catch the sunlight, just like Nex's, I felt a wave of déjà vu.
The woman, mid-sip of black tea, hurriedly set her cup down.
Asha Aureus.
One of the Ten Greats, known by the epithet the Living Sun, who commanded spirit arts through a phoenix.
"What brings Princess Phine Gransia all the way to the North..."
"It just turned out that way. Asha Aureus."
Our first encounter with her had gone well enough, for now. How was I, an outsider, supposed to talk her around and actually make Nex and Chartiness's marriage happen?
"It's a pleasure to meet you, Living Sun."
I offered a polite greeting first, easing Asha's guard, at least for now.
Well. Once I'd dealt with the apostle and had a proper talk with her, it seemed like we'd be able to see eye to eye, to some degree. After all, I knew exactly why Nex's hair was purple.
That was the same reason I'd been so certain Phine's hair had been black back when she went by Mardol.
Come to think of it, why was our Phine's hair white? I'd never once found it odd until just now. Glancing over on a whim, I found her eyes already on mine.
"..Ah, Licht. What is it?"
"It's nothing, Your Highness."
Startled, her ears shot straight up. Just how long had she been watching me, anyway?
The awkward way she whipped her head aside to hide the fact that she'd been staring only made it more suspicious.
"My name is Licht. I've come as reinforcement to help hold off the monster incursions in the North."
"Ah, you're the hero who's said to have subjugated the Demon King of Omniscience?"
Setting aside the prickling stare I'd been feeling from Phine since a moment ago,
"Yes. I'm Licht, the 'Hero of Wisdom.'"
For now, to put out the most urgent fire, I lied to Asha and laid out my resolve.
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