WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

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◈ Academy's Pure Love Dark Knight ◈

Chapter 93

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Episode 93. Christmas carols rang out.

* * *

A hospital always grows quiet once night falls and the cold settles in.

'So the time's finally come, Lee Suhyun.'

I slipped out of my hospital room and ran. In the end, someone had to be sacrificed.

White corridors, a pure white ceiling. I passed through a ramp thick with the falling dusk,

"So this is where I spend the last Christmas of my life."

I arrived at the place that would mark my final act. The auditorium, where I'd met Santa with a boy named Youngmin just a little while ago.

I looked up at the big tree on the stage. A tree decorated with tiny lights of every color, a large glittering star perched at the very top.

If I stayed in this place, I wouldn't get out. I already knew that in my head. I gripped the cold steel in my hand and locked the latch again.

I didn't know why the boy named Youngmin had been here in the original past.

"Just in case. I'll lock the door too..."

Maybe he'd wanted to see Santa one more time, or maybe, just like the lie I'd made up, he'd really waited here hoping to see Rudolph.

Seeing the door standing open sent a chill down my spine. If it had been properly locked, he would have been fine.

Fate looks light and trivial, but sometimes it comes to a person in a form this cruel.

And more often than not, its victims are

'just people who were never ready to accept it.'

But if it meant taking the life of such a small, tiny child,

wasn't it better to take the fly-sized life of a coward who'd already once tried to give up on living?

Youngmin never even got to eat the hamburger he'd wanted, never got to play with the combining robot he'd just been given.

"..."

If sacrificing one life of mine could protect a child's smile and happiness, that was a fairly cheap price.

The guilt of failing to save someone had always weighed heavily on me. If I'd never known the Saintess, I probably would have gone on feeling like I was living in mud, too.

"It's a bit chilly. Guess it's just winter."

That's the same reason I'd offered Mardol Gransia comfort that didn't even really work.

Apologizing to her now would only be a cowardly excuse, a mistake for failing to consider her wounds properly, but

what could a mere child version of her have done against a Demon King like Magic Hat? Expecting anything else would have been strange to begin with.

Whether she carried the wolf king's blood or descended from the Ten Greats, whatever she was, everyone has moments of weakness.

A cruel reality where she could do nothing at all. She must have hated herself for being so powerless, must have grieved over it.

Maybe it was just cheap sympathy, honestly. Maybe, without really understanding her circumstances, I was just forcing her situation to fit my own so I could claim to understand it.

'That's ugly of you, Lee Suhyun.'

Still, it didn't matter. A deep wound, like my own burn scars, only festers and rots if it isn't brought out and treated in time.

People can lean on other people. I'd learned that much from the Nameless Saintess.

I wanted to fill the hollow, glass-like emptiness in Mardol's heart. Call me a predictable, run-of-the-mill hypocrite if you like.

'...I didn't expect it to end like this, though.'

I sank down beside the Christmas tree. The outside air, which I hadn't felt in a long while, tousled my hair.

My small hands caught my eye. My body had shrunk like this back when I'd first been reincarnated into the game, too. Looking back now, a lot had happened since then.

"I met Drunkard Dennis."

The protagonist of the first game, <Knight Heart>, someone I'd only ever seen on a screen.

A drunk man with striking blue hair and white-glowing eyes.

I knew he'd suffered something terrible at a Demon King's hands.

Of course I knew, because in the canon storyline's ending, I'd formed a party with Dennis and fought Head.

The Demon King of Omniscience, who referenced a player's save file and came prepared in advance.

That's why, as a precaution, I'd taught Dennis the three-dimensional magic circle beforehand. I had a feeling the Academy would be attacked, just like today.

Enemies suddenly storming in was a common enough event in the game,

and this was a world where you never knew what might happen. I had to do everything I could.

'Master Baek-Mokryeon... I hope this whole thing ends well even without me.'

An Eastern dragon with brown hair and deer antlers.

Someone who polymorphed into the shape of a human woman,

my second master, who carried the rather outlandish backstory of having been Hero-summoned from another world as the Heavenly Demon.

She'd been Dennis's lover, but through Erasure of knowledge, she'd been forgotten, and no trace of her could be found anywhere in the world.

'No, more precisely... it was just vague, hard to find.'

The Demon King's authority wasn't perfect, so traces remained here and there that the Heavenly Demon had once existed among the Ten Greats, but only Dennis still remembered her, aching with longing.

'I still remember the last words Dennis said in the bad ending.'

The male lead, dying at Head's hands, unable even to remember his lover's name, only able to long for the season of spring.

'Seems like he's still growing the boksucho, though.'

The golden flower in the clubroom itself had been foreshadowing from the very start. A flower called the boksucho (福壽草).

It carries a potent poison, dangerous enough that touching it unknowingly can cause poisoning.

Going just by how the name sounds, you'd think it meant "revenge" (復讐), getting even with someone.

'...but that's not actually it.'

It's written with 福, the character for fortune, and 壽, the character for life. Like Mokryeon, the Heavenly Demon's name, it's a plant that blooms in spring.

I remembered reading in the setting materials that because Dennis had once received it from her as a gift, he cherished the poisonous plant so much he'd even cast a barrier spell around it.

'What was its flower language again...'

A yellow flower that blooms out of the snow.

It was a plant much like Dennis's fate: spring only came after pushing through the hardship of winter.

Once Head Ache was defeated, theirs was a couple promised a happy ending. Even in the sequel, Dennis never had another route, he just stayed by her side like a sunflower.

"The heater's not even working."

Wearing only a thin hospital gown, the cold, silent hospital air stabbed straight into my lungs. I gathered up the Santa suit lying nearby and pulled it over myself.

"Come to think of it, I'd even tried to raise Kainel and Ariel's affection meter."

The protagonists of the sequel, <Black Heart>.

Childhood friends who could never be honest about their own feelings.

Honestly, you could say they crammed in every trope from a 2000s-era romantic comedy manga.

A snippy tsundere heroine, and a dense, popular blond guy who couldn't read the room to save his life.

'Still, they're both good people at heart.'

Both Kainel and Ariel were tangled up with the Demon Kings. The reason he'd been chosen as the Hero of Light and scorned for it, the reason the World Tree's forest had burned, all of it.

"...The Heroic Cult."

If you traced it back, it was all because of heroes who'd fallen into becoming Demon Kings.

There were plenty of NPCs with the radical idea that if someone carried a holy sword, they should be cut down preemptively, before it could turn into a demonic blade.

"Thinking about it like that, they really are the axis of evil."

I think "hero" is a title you have to earn through fitting actions. Being chosen by a goddess, hearing a voice from a holy sword, that kind of thing,

'isn't proof enough of being qualified.'

A true hero, I think, is someone who runs toward people to save them, precisely when everyone else is running away.

A little cringeworthy to say, maybe, but I'd kept telling myself that all along. The corner of my mouth curved into a smile.

Last time, I hadn't known, so I couldn't protect him. This time, I'd managed it. I reached up, touched my smooth face, and recalled old memories.

The scar on my face was a wound left behind by a blast of flame from a backdraft.

I'd heard a scream and run back into the hospital. Searching for Youngmin, who hadn't made it out, the moment I gripped and turned a doorknob, Whoom. a wall of fire came pouring out and badly injured just my face.

This time things were different, my whole body would burn instead, but maybe this much was enough to wash away my sin, I thought quietly, with a sigh.

* * *

Close to the hour when Christmas would give way to the next day.

"Evacuate this way!!"

"Hurry!! Get to the stairs!"

"Sir, ma'am, you need to get out right now!"

In stark contradiction to the words "silent night, holy night," the hospital was in chaos.

Acrid black smoke billowed upward, and flickering flames were steadily swallowing the pure-white building whole.

"Licht..! Where on earth are you!"

Phine Gransia ran, her long white hair streaming behind her. Moving in the exact opposite direction of everyone fleeing the hospital, she pushed through the panicked crowd.

"Cough, cough! What's happening..!"

"Where did the fire even start..?!"

Deeper and deeper, into the very heart of the hospital, the Platinum Wolf pressed on.

"I can't find Suhyun! I can't find him..!"

"Youngmin, we have to go, it's dangerous here!"

"He's probably in the auditorium! He said he'd show me Rudolph!!"

And there, Phine found a young-looking boy seated in a wheelchair.

"Santa lady!! Please, you save Suhyun for me!!"

The boy in the red cap, even as someone else's hands pulled him along to safety, was shouting toward Phine.

"...You can see me?"

Her sharp eyes didn't miss the strangeness of that. Being able to see her within this nightmare meant the boy had to be someone important.

"Yeah! You're Santa, right? Your hair's white too..!"

She had none of her protective Masterpiece gear, no helmet or glass armor, and the smoke had already numbed her sense of smell.

Phine had to decide. For a split second she hesitated, wondering whether she should trust the boy's word and head for this auditorium, and then,

'Lee Suhyun...? Licht...?'

certainty settled over her at once. If it was the Licht she knew, he'd have gone alone into a place like that to save children, she realized, from everything they'd been through together.

"Cough, the auditorium's that way! Please, you have to bring Suhyun back out!"

"I understand."

The boy in the red cap had smiled even though he clearly looked unwell, asking this of her.

Even as he was being carried away to safety, Youngmin pointed a finger toward somewhere far off, and Phine, feeling grateful to him, nodded.

"...I'll protect Licht, I promise. Little one."

He was the only fool who, even in a situation like this, hadn't fled and was doing something alone.

She ran in that direction. She sprinted. Without channeling mana, her legs began to ache.

'I have to hold out. Not from something like this..!'

At times gritty ash got into her mouth, leaving a bitter taste, and the searing heat made her lungs feel like they were burning. Her throat had already taken burns.

"Licht!!"

But none of it mattered to her. No matter how much pain, how much injury, her desire to save Licht, suffering somewhere in this nightmare, was greater still.

Phine came face to face with a large iron door. Unmistakably, the end of the path the boy had pointed toward.

"Cough, cough."

A dry cough tore out of her. She grabbed the handle and pushed, but it only rattled with a metallic clink, refusing to budge.

"Licht!! Are you in there?!"

She pounded hard on the door, but there was no response from inside. Actually, this wasn't quite what she'd heard to begin with.

'No response. Is this wrong?'

He'd clearly said he heard a scream and went back in, getting burned, so maybe this wasn't the place.

"No, Phine Gransia."

The flames closing in from behind her made her flinch for a moment, but she slapped her own cheeks with both hands and steadied her wavering resolve.

A man who had once worn a Black Knight's helmet.

Stronger than anyone, and yet at times weaker than anyone.

The person who'd awakened feeling in her when she'd been like cold, brittle glass, who'd lifted the guilt from her shoulders, someone she owed so much to.

A lonely wolf who piled up lies because he hated hurting others, who fought his battles alone.

Also, maybe because he had no experience with women, someone innocent and endearing enough to flush red at just the sight of her figure.

"This man... he's here."

The man who had given her every feeling she was experiencing now was beyond that door, her instincts howled like a wolf's, certain of it.

* * *

The fire alarm had been blaring for a long while now, and smoke had begun trickling in bit by bit through the gap under the door.

"Guess I won't get to see my Saintess after all, right to the end."

I'd thought I'd leave this life without a single regret, but shamefully enough, there's one thing I still regret.

I never got to meet her, the one with the pure white hair, the wolf ears, the tail.

'I couldn't even tell anyone what she looked like, afraid Head might trace her through it.'

I'd gotten scared after hearing, during the fight with Servi, that Head could find her.

Once the problem of the Demon King of Omniscience was solved, half the battle was already won. He was the final boss of the first game, after all, so I couldn't let some unforeseen variable bring her harm.

No matter how deep I'd dug through the game's community forums, nothing ever came up about the Saintess's past or her name.

I'd even read posts from other players who'd gotten into the imperial palace and dug through the records, but nowhere was there anything written about the Platinum Wolf.

'If there's a next life... maybe I'll get to meet her then.'

Cold sweat broke out as the flames crept closer. Guess I still hadn't gotten over that trauma, even now.

I glanced at the clock on the wall, it was almost past midnight already. So there was no such thing as a Christmas miracle after all, huh.

The moment I closed my eyes, having given up on everything.

"Licht!!"

The iron door blocking the auditorium's entrance blew off its hinges with a Bang.

It wasn't a backdraft. What had just happened?

"I knew it, you're here..!"

A voice reached me, someone calling out for me desperately, searching. And at the source of that voice stood the very woman I'd only been imagining until moments ago,

"...Saintess?"

looking just slightly different from how I remembered her, dressed in the pure white Academy uniform.

'Her height, her voice... they're exactly the same as what I know. How is that even possible?'

White hair falling to her waist, small, twitching pure white wolf ears and a tail, irises glowing gold.

This time it wasn't a Heroic Cult attack, not a fake mimicking her appearance like with Servi. I recognized at a glance that she truly was the Nameless Saintess.

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