WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

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◈ Academy's Pure Love Dark Knight ◈

Chapter 88

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Episode 88. Everyone Needs a Headache Pill.

The timing was far too early.

'Damn it, why did they storm the academy? Because I beat Magic Hat?'

At the very least, going by the setting, I'd expected the attackers to show up only after Kainel and Ariel graduated from the academy, five years from now, right around the start of <Knight Heart>.

"Glory to the Four Heroes!!"

"Use the academy students to hold back the Ten Greats!!"

A mob of cultists held blades to the students' throats and threatened them with magic, doing everything they could to keep the Ten Greats from finding Head.

Watching it turned my stomach. Same as with Servi, this guy was hypocrisy given flesh.

A lunatic who thought it fine for other people to be ground up, so long as it saved the many.

I cut down the cultists filling the hallway outside the classroom and ran. I used Giyu to dodge their attacks while heading for the central hall.

Head Ache. The Demon King of Omniscience.

There was a reason I'd never suspected him whenever I thought about our Saintess.

'The Demon King's authority and abilities aren't perfect either.'

When he looked at the Nameless Saintess, it was clear she couldn't take even a single life, which was why she'd been excluded from the final battle.

The two of them had acted like total strangers to each other. At least, that was why I'd never thought it was Head's doing. Plenty of other games had a "nameless character" trope too.

Characters who lost their memories, had their names stripped away, or were forgotten by history, that was a common enough setup. Every famous game has one somewhere.

'Besides, even if his authority made someone forgotten, some trace of it has to remain somewhere.'

That had been true of the Heavenly Demon carved into the Ten Greats' statue, and true of Dennis, who never forgot her. Even the Demon King's authority wasn't all-powerful.

Even Magic Hat could only turn things into lies, the real thing, written down as a name or a record, stayed in the world somewhere. That was her weakness.

Strengths and weaknesses. Especially for a good ability, there was usually some countermeasure that came bundled with it. Nothing in the world is perfect.

'In the original... how did that part go?'

A Demon King who pulled from a save file. Beating him required a bit of a trick.

'I need to find Dennis, the original protagonist.'

The key point was that he couldn't reference a save file updated in real time. Because his "calculation" worked off information he'd already previewed in advance.

Attacking with information he didn't have was effective. That was probably why Dennis had tried to warp Head's calculations in real time, under the pretense of a group project.

'Dennis, now that he's mastered the three-dimensional magic circle, might as well be Head's natural predator.'

All I had to do was use the most recently acquired weapon or technique. Of course, Head had a baseline set of stats guaranteed to him regardless, so it might not be easy.

Unlike how things went at the ending of <Knight Heart>, I had no artifact-tier items and no maxed-out allies right now. Still, I'd made up my mind that I had to do this.

"..The ocean? How?"

I stopped in front of the central hall. Looking at the building, sitting in the middle of what seemed like an isolated pocket of ocean, I felt a wave of helplessness.

'This isn't how it went in the original.'

Someone had already figured out Dennis's weakness in advance. I had no idea where my movements had been given away from.

* * *

Dennis was resting as usual, watering the yellow flowers.

"..Hm? What's going on?"

Then, a gunshot rang out and everything around him went dark. A sound he'd heard before.

Recognizing it instantly as Head Ache's attack, Dennis looked out the window.

"Damn it.. Head, you son of a bitch."

He opened the window to find fish swimming placidly all around outside. He tried to use a magic circle to force his way out the door.

"..Water mixes with water. Rivers flow into the sea. Is that it."

His water-attribute magic kept getting canceled out. An attack using spirit magic.

Similarly, the Ten Greats member Asha Aureus's phoenix burned everything else it touched.

By that logic, a water spirit could be used to dissolve everything the same way.

On top of that, his magic was alcohol, in concept, dilute it and its potency dulls. Even Dennis, who bent concepts to cast his magic, had a weakness.

But was there really someone in this era capable of commanding this much water? The question had barely formed in his head when-

"Professor Dennis!!"

"..Licht? How did you get in here?"

That was the moment. A man wearing a Black Knight helmet walked into the club room. As if answering his question, Licht held up a sword tinted with blue light.

"It rains even in the ocean."

"I see. But aren't we still trapped like rats in a barrel?"

Licht had used Giyu to get in through wherever the rain was falling, and water dripped steadily from his entire body, as if he'd swum the rest of the way.

Dennis kept activating magic circles, trying to punch through the water barrier over and over.

"Professor, forget that, let's use the three-dimensional magic circle."

"Isn't that neutralized by spirit magic too? Licht?"

"For ordinary magic, sure. But..."

Watching him struggle, the Black Knight couldn't help offering a word of advice, and the blue-haired man's face lit up in understanding.

"Teleportation. Unlike before, you can use it now, Professor."

"..Right."

Dennis spread his palm open. A cluster of magic circles rose from his right hand, forming a complete sphere.

"Spatial coordinates are three-dimensional too, same as this magic circle you taught me."

He spun the satellites orbiting the spherical magic circle rapidly, casting several spells at once.

"If spirit magic makes a few of the circles fail by mixing them up, all I have to do is increase the number of circles to compensate."

Dennis and I turned into droplets of water and teleported outside the central hall.

* * *

Once we got outside, the academy was falling further and further into chaos. I could see Laplace throwing up magic circles to hold the Heroic Cult back,

and the Sage using foresight to evacuate students to the safest spots she could find.

"..Could that be."

I felt a chill looking at the long-haired, black-haired woman controlling an orca spirit outside. A figure connected to Nex from <Black Heart>.

I'd already known Chartiness's kidnapping had something to do with Head, but I hadn't expected the rot to run this deep.

'Now I know for sure why Nex went bad.'

It had been the Demon King of Omniscience's scheme all along. But why? What could possibly be worth the risk of kidnapping the 2nd Saintess to pull off?

'A prophecy, right, he definitely mentioned a prophecy that time.'

Something I'd heard while fighting Servi. As I sat there puzzling over how strange that had been, Dennis spoke up.

"..the young lady from that border earldom, Aqua, why is she here..? Don't tell me she's sided with the Demon King?"

"That grail-looking thing in her arms. Don't tell me that's..."

In the game, it was a cursed item that boosted a user's spirit-related skills in exchange for making them pay a heavy price.

The moment I saw it, I ran straight for the orca beastkin.

"..."

"Something's wrong. With her."

Her eyes had no focus. Drool ran from her mouth. I thought she was about to sic the orca on me,

but her hands never stopped, she just kept flooding the central hall with seawater.

'Erasure of knowledge got to her. That's not like Head.'

Watching her, I felt something was off. If having her here like this, keeping Dennis from getting out, was what he'd wanted,

then she was a discarded pawn, plain and simple.

So what was Head actually after right now?

What could this "prophecy" possibly be, that the Demon King of Omniscience was this obsessed, acting this boldly? I stopped where I stood for a moment and thought it through.

In the original <Knight Heart>, once his health dropped below a certain point, the Demon King would take out the revolver he carried and shoot himself in the temple.

'Failed again this time too. See you at the time of the prophecy. That's what he'd say.'

A way of clearing the fight that felt almost anticlimactic, if you looked at it a certain way. Which was part of why the boss fight itself was actually easier than Magic Hat's.

But what was this, right now? What could this prophecy be, that made him look this desperate?

It was rare for him to personally show up like this. Even in the original, he'd only ever appeared right at the very end.

This was far too intense for someone with his cold personality. If he were only after me, he wouldn't need to go this far.

'Think. Think. What's different here from what I know?'

The change to Nex Aureus and Chartiness's history, Kainel and Ariel overcoming their trauma by driving off Magic Hat, enrolling at the academy...

'Wait, enrolling at the academy?'

As my thoughts kept unspooling, a jolt ran through my whole body, like I'd been struck by lightning. From the start, the third installment's protagonist wasn't me, the player.

Unlike Suhyun, who was playing the game, I was just a character he'd raised. The Black Knight, Licht. So then the protagonist of <Grand Hearts Academy> was,

Mardol Gransia.

The cold yet warm Glass Knight. The Empire's princess. Head might be after her. If Chartiness's kidnapping had been for this from the very start,

'It would make sense.'

If I hadn't been around, he could have recruited Nex Aureus too, and with both the older sister and brother she knew held hostage,

she'd have fallen into the Demon King's grasp easily. She'd already been shaken just by seeing Empress Bellin.

'If it played out that way, he might have been able to overturn the entire empire.'

Emperor Rook really did care deeply about his family, so if his own daughter's life were on the line, he might well have surrendered to the Demon King.

That was probably why Mardol never appeared in the original or its sequel, why the crown prince Lupus had shown up instead, covering the gap so no one noticed anything was off.

-Bang.

That was the moment. A gunshot pierced my ears again. The direction was the upper floor of the academy building where the second-years were, the place where Nex Aureus was.

"..Professor Dennis."

"What is it, Licht?"

There was no more time to think. I had to decide, whether to go find Mardol again and protect her, or protect Nex instead.

"For now, send me to Nex Aureus and..."

As I agonized over who to go to, I remembered what our Saintess had once told me, that a Black Knight who protected everyone was better than a hero who protected just one person.

"Teleport me to wherever Mardol is, exactly five minutes from now."

On top of that, if I'm being honest, I was greedy.

I didn't want to let a single person fall to the Demon King's scheme.

If it was the Dennis I knew, he could manage it. The cultists in white robes were charging at us again,

"Thinking about it, I was summoned to fill in a gap, but you, Licht, you're a real hero."

"..Actually, I'm not that. I'm just a Black Knight."

His white eyes flared as he dealt with the students held hostage in the back ranks, then he said this briefly.

It was more or less true. A stand-in chosen to deal with heroes who'd fallen to corruption. That was Dennis.

Neither of us had a holy sword, the proof of being chosen as a hero. But the world has fakes worth more than the real thing.

Strong ordinary people who'd banded together to take down a hero turned Demon King, that was the meaning and identity of the group called the Ten Greats.

"Professor. Don't you think a world that relies on heroes alone is far too convenient?"

If a hero were the only one who could stop a Demon King, what was that world even there for? Especially when the hero they'd put forward fell so far short of the qualification.

A true hero is supposed to earn the right to the title. In an age when a proper hero like Kainel had become old-fashioned, I'd secretly admired people like that.

"Right, that's a fair point too. Leave this to me now. 'Black Knight' Licht."

Hearing my question, Dennis smiled with something like trust in it, and activated the three-dimensional magic circle.

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