WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

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◈ Academy's Pure Love Dark Knight ◈

Chapter 91

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Episode 91. Christmas carols rang out.

A boy in a wheelchair, wearing a red beanie. I remembered this kid.

"It's Suhyun! You're getting discharged tomorrow, right? Congrats!"

We hadn't shared the room for long, but like boys that age usually did.

"One more round! This one doesn't count!"

All it took was a shared interest, something like a game, to get close fast.

"Ugh... Suhyun really is good at games."

It was around the time handheld game consoles had gotten popular enough that most households had one.

We'd grown close over a game with a character in a red hat that looked a lot like the boy, Youngmin.

"Come on! Aren't you going way too easy on me?! Don't do that!"

On top of that, he was cheerful and full of hope, famous around the whole hospital. Even the nurses and doctors would say so.

"Youngmin, how did physical therapy go today? Here, some chocolate!"

"Wow! Thank you!"

There were a lot of people who showed him kindness like that.

"So, Suhyun. Once I get discharged, I'm gonna eat hamburgers until I'm about to burst!"

"I really hope you get to do that, Youngmin."

The words came out automatically, like tape unspooling, and left my mouth dry with the metallic taste of blood.

"Can't eat that here, it's bad for you..! And the bread they give you at the hospital doesn't even taste good..."

The words telling him to run, the sentence that a fire was about to break out, stuck in my throat and wouldn't come out.

I wanted to spit out the truth. I wanted to protect the boy in front of me.

'Isn't there some way to save this kid.'

When the fire actually happened, I'd been led out of the building quickly, following the hospital staff's directions.

"Dinner's curry tonight since it's Christmas. Isn't that exciting, Suhyun?"

"Yeah, exciting. Though I'm not a fan of the broccoli."

But the boy named Youngmin hadn't managed that, wherever he'd been.

The children's ward, choking with black smoke.

I'd felt something was off, someone missing, and looked around in a panic, but the kid in the wheelchair with the red beanie was nowhere to be seen.

Before the firefighters or anyone else arrived, I'd heard a scream, and run back alone into the burning building.

"You seem kind of grown-up today, Suhyun!"

"..."

I hadn't been able to save that boy. I'd gritted my teeth and kept searching even after my face was badly burned.

But there was only so much a child's body could do. In the end, I never even found out where he was.

If I had a sword now, if this were my real, adult body, couldn't I change something?

'..That's a coward's excuse. Lee Suhyun.'

I'd told myself I wouldn't feel regret anymore. In the end I'd done everything I could.

I'd pushed myself hard enough to develop trauma from it, and rationalized the rest as being blocked by the wall of reality.

That was the fate of a coward who ran. In the end the burn scar became a brand, something people pointed fingers at, and it ate away at my own heart.

"Look how much snow's piled up! When we go outside, I want to make a huge snowman!"

I'd have to go through that scene all over again. Cold sweat covered my whole body. Blood rushed through my head as I scrambled to think of any solution.

'Where on earth did the fire even start.'

Decades later, I'd dug through newspapers and news reports, but the exact cause of the fire never came up. This hospital hadn't even had sprinklers.

"Huh, Suhyun. Are you crying...? If you cry, Santa won't come! What do we do!"

I wiped at my eyes. Without the helmet, I could feel the smooth surface of my own face. So this much I could do. Maybe I could get information across through sign language, or braille, or a pen.

'Damn it, my body won't move the way I want.'

Everything failed. I tried blinking out SOS in Morse code, but.

'That's not working either.'

It was impossible. So it seemed like I couldn't do anything my past self wouldn't have done.

'A past I can't change... then....'

I'd have to follow the past's course as closely as possible, and look for a variable within it. Even a trauma like this had to hold some hope somewhere.

"..Youngmin, are you going to watch tonight's Christmas event?"

"Yeah! Of course!"

The Christmas event the hospital had held the evening before.

An adult dressed up as Santa would appear and pull wrapped toys or things like sketchbooks out of a gift sack.

It was the last memory before our two fates turned into something horrible.

"Let's go watch it together."

If I couldn't change the past, maybe I could at least do something here, now. That was the judgment I landed on.

* * *

The place she'd rushed into to save Licht, who'd lost consciousness from the Apostle of Gluttony's attack.

At first she'd assumed Licht's trauma had to be something like fighting some tremendous enemy.

It made sense to think so, since from what she'd seen fighting him herself, he was an outlier of strength beyond any standard.

But where on earth was this?

"Where...?"

Phine Gransia couldn't hide her confusion at the scene around her.

Her white hair falling to her waist, her golden irises, her pure white wolf ears, all of it felt jarringly out of place here.

Most of the people around her had black hair and brown eyes, like Licht.

"Mom! I want to eat pork cutlet!"

"Okay, but let's get the X-ray done first. All right?"

"Hehe, you have to keep your promise!"

Every one of them was human. No matter how hard she looked, she couldn't find a single person with the features of another race, the way people back in the Gransia Empire had.

"When's the next surgery scheduled? Doctor?"

"Our hospital's closed for Christmas, so... how about late January?"

"That works. Please book it."

And yet not a single person recognized her or paid her any attention. A building full of children in white clothes and men and women who looked like their parents.

'Is this some kind of treatment facility...?'

Looking with her keen eyes, she could tell that every single person here seemed to be suffering from something.

Phine guessed Licht had probably been here too, back when he'd been hurt.

'Winter. It's completely winter outside.'

Snow had piled up beyond the window, pale like her own white hair, the exact opposite of the sweltering early summer she'd just left behind at the Academy.

"...So it's true. You really were a hero, Licht."

She'd more or less guessed that the man in the Black Knight helmet was a hero summoned from another world, but she hadn't realized just how different a place he'd come from.

Wasn't this a world with nothing to do with her at all? Even the sparkling star-topped tree over there was strange to her, and the letters she could see all around were in a form she couldn't read.

'The voice-amplifying magic isn't working either.'

Magic didn't work here at all. She didn't know if it was because there was no mana in the air, or because this was a nightmare.

Things she'd never seen before, clothes she'd never seen before, people she'd never seen before.

Everything around her was strange and unfamiliar.

In truth, this was the kind of place that could easily have frightened the princess. Wasn't it only natural to feel lost, dropped without warning into somewhere you'd never seen in your life?

"Licht! Where are you!!"

But there was no time to dwell on any of that. Phine immediately looked around and started searching for Licht.

There had to be some incident here, something that had left that man no choice but to carry this trauma. The worry kept circling back to her.

Maybe because this was inside his memories, but there was no helmet, no glass armor wrapping around her here.

"Licht..!"

Phine moved without hesitation. She no longer needed the shell called Masterpiece to hide behind.

A hero who'd come from a world this distant, this different from her own, had fought Magic Hat for her sake, risking his life.

He'd saved the people precious to her from Head's schemes, alongside Chartiness and Nex.

She'd been saved by the man in the Black Knight helmet, and little by little, she'd grown closer to him.

A wounded wolf who had shared his own pain with her, who had held her and comforted her once.

'We can overcome trauma together. So please, show yourself.'

She felt impatient. Her heart clenched painfully. She hated not knowing what might happen here, hated the fear that this man, Licht, must be feeling.

"Ugh..!"

Unable to draw on her mana, she tripped while running and fell. Her cheek scraped lightly against the ground.

The Glass Knight, who had lived her whole life with a body brimming with mana. A restriction like this was something entirely new to her.

'..This is how Licht struggled too. Phine.'

Pushing herself up off the ground, Phine's eyes burned with resolve. Before enrolling at the Academy, she'd been like an empty piece of glass herself.

She'd thought the cold world was transparent, like something reflected in glass, and that emotion was unnecessary in it.

'If I don't find Licht soon, he'll only suffer more.'

She still regretted that as a child, when Magic Hat had broken into the imperial palace, taken her mother, and killed the maids, she'd been able to do nothing.

She'd lived under guilt that always felt like it was about to crush her. She'd wrongly concluded that nothing meant anything unless she made herself stronger.

'If Licht hadn't told me to hold my breath, I would have been taken too..'

She might have been trapped in trauma, forced to taste something horrific. He could have held only his own breath, but he was always the kind of Black Knight who put others before himself.

'He helped Nex and Char, and came to protect us.'

Only now, thanks to Licht, had she finally been able to breathe again. She couldn't even measure how grateful she was for the comfort of being told it wasn't her fault.

Once she fell and regained her composure, the image of the burned, fire-fearing Black Knight flickered in front of her eyes.

'Fire. Is the problem fire...?'

What he'd told her before at the festival booth, about hearing a scream as a child and running back in and getting hurt, flashed quickly through her mind.

If a fire had broken out in this place and left him burned, left him with this trauma, it would all make sense.

A man who feared people's touch and flinched from it, like an injured puppy.

'Licht's younger self... I have to find him.'

To save him, the girl clad in pure white ran through a hospital she'd never seen before.

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