WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Asakusa
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◈ Knight Commander of the Doomed Heroes ◈
Chapter 1: Revel Vieta, Commander of the Order of Eternity
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“Sir Haeyrin!”
Whenever I called, her lowered eyebrows would lift.
“You’re here? But do you remember what I told you? What did I say to call me instead of Sir Haeyrin?”
“Hae. No. Ha. Harin noona?”
“That’s right! Oh, you’re so clever. So cute. I should buy you some ice cream for that. What kind of world doesn’t even have ice cream?”
As she spoke, she would pull a piece of candy from somewhere and pop it into my mouth.
She was the woman who had saved my life.
The day a twisted angel appeared above the capital, landed on our mansion, and tore my father and mother apart.
Harin noona descended before me as I stood there in a daze.
Black hair streamed behind her white uniform.
“Keep your eyes closed. Morning will be here soon. What a horrible nightmare, right?”
After that day, I hung around her patrol route every day.
Perhaps I was hoping to find a mother’s warmth in her.
I thought she probably knew and let me cling to her anyway... But even if I wanted to ask her, I couldn’t anymore.
One day, she suddenly disappeared.
I was seven.
The night before, a bright light had risen outside the city. A mysterious light that washed the whole world white.
It was so dazzling that I saw white even with my eyes closed. Its remnants scattered across the sky, spreading into a white aurora.
The moon and stars looked as though they were wrapped in a white veil. That night, I sneaked out of the orphanage and wandered the streets until dawn, gazing up at the night sky.
I wanted to tell her about it.
So I ran to see her as soon as morning came, but she wasn’t there.
Not that day.
Not the next.
Not a month later.
Not a year later.
I never saw her again.
The adults told me she was sleeping. That she was sleeping a very, very long sleep in the Palace of Heroes.
# Core Problem
⇒ The greater the density of magic power, the more strongly it interacts with matter.
When the density of magic power rises beyond what its owner’s body can withstand, all that power takes physical form at once, causing a magical explosion large enough to redraw the map.
# Solution (1)
⇒ Strengthen the body through permanent buff spells, allowing it to withstand the increased density of magic power.
⇒ Calculation result: impossible. A temporary measure, not a fundamental solution.
* * *
I learned the truth later.
Girls from other worlds.
We called people like Harin noona “heroes” or “witches.”
If they helped us, they were honored as heroes. If they took their anger out on us, they were witches.
Girls who had been living perfectly well in their own worlds, only to be thrown out without warning and crash-land in this terrible one.
At least so far, there had never been a male hero.
For more than a hundred years, they had all been girls.
One theory claimed that only women, who could carry new life, could hold such enormous magic power. Whether that was true, I didn’t know.
But their inborn magic power was so far beyond ours that people came up with theories like that.
And they kept growing stronger without end. Their magic power grew even as they did nothing but breathe.
Until, at last, their mortal bodies could no longer bear it, and they exploded.
It usually took three years to reach that point.
A short life.
There was a reason most of them were angry or depressed.
And after much thought, most reached a similar conclusion.
Their lives were going to end anyway. They might as well spend them on something “worthwhile.”
That white light I had seen that night, that aurora wrapping around the moon and stars, had all been the last traces Harin noona left in this world.
Her final explosion, unleashed before the monsters driving humanity toward extinction.
Humanity had been saved once again, and I would never see Harin noona again.
By the time I learned that truth, volunteering for the Order of Eternity seemed only natural.
The Order of Eternity was the order of knights that third-year heroes belonged to.
Harin noona had belonged to it, too.
On the day I reported for duty, the commander said this to me.
“Do you know why I picked you?”
“Yes. I graduated at the top of my class in support magic at the academy, and the paper I published while studying there...”
“No. None of that matters in this job. There’s only one reason I picked you. You’ve got a handsome face.”
The commander wasn’t a girl hero. He was a potbellied man in his fifties.
He continued with a nasty grin.
“The girls in our order come in exactly two types. Either they’ve got a rotten temper, or they’re so depressed they look ready to drop dead. So put that handsome face to good use. Keep them happy. They’re on their way out anyway, so make sure they spend that last bit of life on us. Think of yourself as a young lover trying to get his hands on a rich old woman’s inheritance.”
The commander chuckled, apparently pleased with his own comparison.
I didn’t laugh.
# Solution (5)
⇒ Modifying an enchantment spell to raise the body’s mana affinity to the level of a spirit should prevent conflict between magic power and the body.
⇒ Plan abandoned. Animal experiments succeeded in turning flesh into a half-spirit state. However, the animals were confirmed to lose their essential nature as animals in the process. Such an irreversible change is effectively murder.
* * *
“Ha ha ha! Well done! I never thought Rassina would sacrifice herself! Picking you was the right choice after all, eh? I knew I had an eye for people. Once you charmed her with that handsome face, how could she refuse to do her job? Ha ha ha! Thanks to you, we held the Great Southern Wall. Who knew her magic power was that strong? Ha ha ha. Hey, Revel. How’d you win her over? Huh? What’s the secret to your honey trap? Did you take your shirt off or something? Come on, give me the details. Ha ha ha!”
“...”
Honey trap?
On her last night, Rassina had done nothing but cry in the garden until morning.
I couldn’t even comfort her. I had only stood awkwardly beside her. She had never opened up to me, not even at the end.
When morning came, she wiped away her tears, patted my shoulder once, and left for the southern front.
“I’m going to die anyway.”
There was an enormous explosion beyond the Great Southern Wall. Everything turned white from one end of the horizon to the other. That was the last I saw of her.
Dead at sixteen.
She had said her home was a world covered in ocean, where all the land floated in the sky.
Perhaps that was why she had loved climbing to high places so much.
She had been so small, and so easily frightened.
# Solution (31)
⇒ Fix magic power in place so it cannot flow. No matter how strongly dense magic power interacts with matter, it should not destroy its owner’s body if it cannot flow in the first place.
⇒ Failure. Fixing magic power in place was successful. However, fixed magic power becomes more uncertain. Observed a phenomenon in which magic power condensed without settling into a definite state, then suddenly underwent a massive collapse. The thought of this happening inside a hero’s body makes my skin crawl.
* * *
Harris Bonfellion, commander of the Order of Eternity.
The bald man died.
An autopsy revealed that a mosquito was to blame.
Harris Bonfellion had been born with weak magic power, leaving him with no resistance to demonic energy. Unfortunately, he also enjoyed Absian, a drink that lowered various magical resistances. As it happened, after drinking himself senseless on Absian and reducing his resistance to almost nothing, he was bitten by a mutant mosquito that had fed on a monster’s blood.
With his resistance as low as it could possibly be, he could not withstand the tiny amount of demonic energy the mosquito introduced into his body.
And so, in the end, he died.
A dreadful coincidence.
Still, to think a person could die because of alcohol and a mosquito.
How frightening.
I burned all the Absian I had stocked up to give my superior as regular gifts, along with the mosquitoes I kept as pets and the monster blood I had stored for research.
After that, the Order of Eternity changed commanders twice more.
The second commander’s lecturing tone angered the girl knights, or rather, the heroes. The Round Table Council eventually voted unanimously to dismiss them. I hadn’t done anything that time. It had simply happened on its own.
The third commander was a true soldier. They were dull company, but capable at their job and firm in their principles, so all the girl knights respected them.
And so, on the Day of Catastrophe, when three apostles appeared at once and every knight chose to sacrifice herself, the commander declared that a commander could hardly run away alone. They stayed and died in the explosions alongside the knights.
...
Having lost every knight, the Order of Eternity was reorganized.
...
...
And so I...
“Revel Vieta is hereby appointed the thirteenth commander of the Order of Eternity.”
At twenty-seven years old.
I became the youngest commander in its history.
# Solution (101)
⇒ Use permanent buffs to improve the subject’s control over magic power. If magic power can be placed entirely under the caster’s control, its interference with matter can be minimized.
⇒ No theoretical problems. Focus on this method.
* * *
Three months had passed since the Day of Catastrophe, when the Order of Eternity was wiped out.
At last, a new knight came to report for duty.
“Fuck.”
That was the first word she said.
A hero who had just entered her third year since crash-landing in our world.
Around this time, their endlessly growing magic power began to eat away at their bodies.
This was usually when heroes realized they had only a short time left to live.
And they faced a choice.
Remain a hero.
Hide.
Or curse the world and become a witch.
Coming to the Order of Eternity meant she had decided to remain a hero. Of course, that didn’t mean she could feel good about it.
I looked at her standing there in misery and spoke.
“...Let me offer a defense first. Our world has never performed any sort of hero-summoning ritual. In other words, your crash-landing here was an accident that had nothing to do with us. It probably happened because of the Outer God’s influence.”
“I haven’t even said anything.”
“Heroes from ‘Earth’ usually have that suspicion. I thought I’d get it out of the way.”
She flinched.
The girl, whose name was Baek Soyeon, stared at me with wide, round eyes.
“What? You know about Earth?”
“I also know that Baek Soyeon is a Korean name.”
“Ah! W-what? Are you Korean too, mister!?”
Being called “mister” hurt a little, but I answered without showing it.
“No. I’m a native of Estel.”
Estel was our word for the universe, or the world.
Just as Earth’s Korean name meant a sphere (球) made of earth (地), Estel meant an onion made of light. I didn’t know why we called the world an onion made of light, but that was what we called it.
“But how do you speak Korean...?”
“I studied it.”
“Korean? But the heroes who come here aren’t just from Earth. They come from all kinds of worlds. Martial arts worlds, science fiction, steampunk, cyberpunk... Don’t tell me you speak all their languages?”
“No. I only speak Korean. I can’t even speak English.”
“Huh? Why?”
Because Harin noona had been a hero from Korea.
Instead of answering, I took out the item I had prepared in advance.
“I-is that...?”
“Ice cream.”
“I-it’s real...!”
My masterpiece, made with ice magic based on what Harin noona had told me as a child.
She scooped up a spoonful of that masterpiece and put it in her mouth. Her whole body trembled.
Tears welled up in her eyes.
I discreetly looked away. She sniffled as she ate the ice cream, then spoke.
“I-I’m not falling for it just because you’re nice to me. In the end, all I’m worth to you people is a human nuclear bomb. Something like that, right? You’re being nice because you want to use me once and throw me away.”
“That’s right.”
I looked straight into her wide eyes.
“That’s why I’m going to treat you well.”
# Solution (131)
⇒ ...There is no time. This is still only a temporary measure. But for now, it is the only method available.
Footnotes:
“Noona” is an affectionate Korean term a boy or man uses for an older sister or a close older woman. Soyeon’s “mister” renders “ajeossi,” a common way to address an adult man that can suggest an uncle or a middle-aged man, hence Revel’s wounded pride at twenty-seven.
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