WeTried Translations
Translator: Coughing Baby
Editor: Coughing Baby
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
Chapter 148: Future, Imagination.
──────
A single exchange was all it took.
Jet-black light flashed, and the boy’s scythe cut through the nightmare.
Slice.
A memory was severed.
One chapter from the memories that had tormented the woman her entire life was cut away.
Brown hair scattered in every direction, rolling across the ground.
Ding-!
[You have successfully cleared the regret ‘Reminiscence.’]
[The next stage of trauma will now be set.]
A blue screen appeared before my eyes.
I let out a short breath.
My heavy breath bloomed like sprays of baby's breath.
At the tip of the scythe in my hand, the crisp sound of severing still lingered softly.
“Whew...”
The memories no longer rewound.
When I turned around, I saw the girl staring blankly at me.
“...”
The mask I had placed on her covered her face.
I couldn’t see her expression, but she was surely stunned.
I smiled faintly.
She looked completely different from the Javert I knew.
Like the memory itself, the woman had become younger, taking the form of a fourteen-year-old girl.
“Investigator.”
“...”
Rustle.
Without thinking, I stroked her red hair.
It was a strangely new feeling.
To think Javert had once been this small and cute.
As I tidied her hair, the girl finally came to her senses and spoke.
“...Student Viktor?”
“Yes, Investigator.”
“What exactly... is going on here?”
Had her reason returned now that the trauma had ended?
I could see green eyes beyond the mask.
I explained everything exactly as it was.
This was Purgatory, and we were undergoing the ninetieth-floor trial.
“...So you’re saying we suddenly fell here from the solitary cell?”
“That’s right. We dropped straight here without passing through anything.”
“No... How does that make any sense?”
“You experienced it yourself, didn’t you?”
“How in the world...?”
“Unfortunately, the method and principle behind it are trade secrets.”
“...I suppose that secret is what lets you come and go through closed Purgatory as if it were your own home.”
“Correct.”
I added that with a smile.
The girl’s gaze remained complicated.
“So we’ve only finished the first trial...”
“That’s right. Two stages remain.”
“...”
“Investigator?”
“Why did you bring me to a place like this?”
“Who knows.”
“Student Viktor, please answer me properly.”
“Hmm... The truth is, there was something I wanted to tell you.”
“Something you wanted to tell me...?”
“Hehe. I’ll explain it in due time.”
I lightly ended the conversation.
Then I scooped the child-sized Javert into my arms.
“Hup.”
“S-Student Viktor...?”
Holding her felt quite different from holding Lua.
Perhaps because she felt more like a grown girl.
She was still light, though, so lifting her was easy.
Javert flinched in surprise, but she couldn’t shake me off during this trial.
She lacked the strength to resist.
The girl was still bound by the trauma.
She could barely use even a tenth of her original power.
“Let’s move on to the next stage.”
“No, wait...”
A lone door stood nearby.
A wooden door, the only thing left intact amid the ruined buildings.
It was the path onward.
I walked while holding the girl in my arms.
Still, Javert kept glancing over her shoulder.
“...”
“Hmm?”
Fidget.
There was an anxiety in her that didn’t suit her.
And I knew what was on the girl’s mind.
“Mrs. Droit is safe.”
“...”
“She is your adoptive mother, isn’t she?”
“...I don’t believe I ever told you that.”
I let out a quiet laugh and brushed off her remark with a smile.
Then I casually changed the subject.
“I checked earlier. Mrs. Droit only lost consciousness for a while. She suffered no critical external or internal injuries, so please rest easy. The pursuit party arriving shortly will take the proper measures as well.”
“...”
“For now, let’s proceed to the next stage. It won’t be too late to return here after clearing the remaining trials. She’s unconscious at the moment, so staying here would only waste time.”
“...All right.”
Javert fell silent, then nodded.
The old wooden door.
We grasped the handle and turned it.
Beyond the opening gap, an entirely different sight awaited us.
“...”
“...”
A dark corridor.
Perhaps she sensed something instinctively, because Javert drew in her shoulders.
I patted her back and told her it was all right, then stepped into the blackness while holding her.
Ding-!
[You have begun clearing the regret ‘Imagination.’]
[The designated trauma will now be recreated.]
This was the second regret.
Future, Imagination.
Purgatory’s announcement brushed past my ears.
Then the door we had crossed through closed, and my vision was swallowed by complete darkness.
“...Student Viktor. I believe you can put me down now.”
“My, you grew up quickly.”
Javert had returned to her original form.
The weight in my arms was a little greater.
It must have looked rather funny from the side.
After all, Javert was fairly tall, even among women.
“Put me down.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I said put me down.”
“I said I don’t want to.”
“I can walk on my own.”
“I’m sure you can.”
“If you know that, why are you still refusing to put me down?”
“It’s just that I like spending time standing like this with you, Investigator.”
“...”
Javert’s expression turned complicated.
Had she been moved by those words praising her as my teacher?
I smiled faintly at the green eyes meeting mine.
“Ahem.”
I deliberately stalled, only putting the woman down after nearly ten minutes had passed.
Without saying anything else, Javert simply straightened her disheveled clothes.
Then we walked side by side through the unlit corridor.
Before long, I heard Javert murmur.
The outlines and structure of the building must have begun to look familiar.
“This place is...”
“That’s right. It’s the main building of Grandia Academy.”
Memories showed the past, while imagination showed the future.
More precisely, it showed the regrets one would come to hold in the future.
“...The future? You mean it shows the regrets I’ll have later?”
“That’s right. You could call it a form of precognition.”
“You’re saying that’s possible?”
“Surprising, isn’t it? Purgatory is a truly mysterious place.”
The dark corridor felt somehow sinister.
Something like the smell of blood hung in the air.
Academy fixtures lay broken here and there.
It looked as though some sort of chaos had swept through before we arrived...
‘Should I tell her now?’
After all, the only reason I had come this deep into Purgatory was for this moment.
I quietly considered my opening.
Javert Droit.
An event she would regret in the not-too-distant future.
A turning point that would eventually drive the woman to suicide.
“Investigator.”
“Yes.”
“You will die within the next year.”
“...What?”
It was an abrupt statement.
Javert turned toward me with question marks written all over her face.
My voice, though, remained perfectly calm.
“What do you mean by...?”
“Exactly what I said.”
Javert would die within the next year.
It happened in every route.
You had never survived even once.
You always faced a calamity, and you always stabbed your own throat with a blade.
‘Blue Night.’
The fifth of the Seven Calamities.
It was one of the major turning points in the story.
“That was what happened in the future I saw.”
An invasion by the Cult.
Grandia Academy would be attacked by wicked things.
Apostles of the Evil God would be deployed in droves into the heart of the academy.
Staff and students would fight with everything they had.
In a single night, the place of learning would become a battlefield.
“The future? The academy will be attacked...?”
“You will be caught in a trap, Professor.”
The Cult’s executives.
As many as thirty of them offered themselves as sacrifices.
Through that ritual, they placed a curse upon Javert.
“A curse that distorts perception.”
“...”
“During Blue Night, you were immediately sent into the field. Along with several staff members, you were assigned to defend the main building. It was a brutal battle. Nine Apostles descended over the academy. It was an incident that could have left casualties in the thousands if things went wrong. But you defended the main building brilliantly, in a way worthy of the title of strongest.”
“...”
“The problem came afterward.”
After completing her mission, Javert returned to the main building she had protected.
But the ones waiting for her inside were not students.
They were Chimeras, each mutated into a grotesque form.
They wore academy uniforms, as if they had originally been students.
While the academy’s forces were concentrated outside, an Apostle that had infiltrated the building seemed to have done it.
“It was a horrific sight. Countless students had turned into hideous monsters. You froze on the spot. The two staff members who returned with you reacted the same way. Only days earlier, those students had sat in classrooms, asking questions and taking notes...”
The two staff members couldn’t bring themselves to attack the students.
They only hesitated and backed away, trying to leave.
The situation seemed to have terrified them.
“The two of them said you should leave the main building first and decide what to do with the mutated students afterward. They even wondered whether every student could really have been affected in such a short time. But you did not permit that retreat. In that situation, you had to follow the designated manual.”
“...”
A Chimera could not be returned to its original form.
Its foundation had been twisted, and it could no longer truly be called alive.
There was no reason to let it live.
Killing it immediately was the best way to remove the danger.
That was what Javert’s manual said.
“You charged in.”
“...”
“And slaughtered the Chimeras filling the main building.”
“...”
Perhaps she could roughly predict what came next.
The woman’s face had gone slightly pale.
I continued.
“Once the cleanup was more than halfway complete... That is, after you had exterminated over a hundred Chimeras, the curse was lifted. The curse contaminating your perception was undone.”
Then hell unfolded.
Javert stood there, stepping on students’ corpses.
“They were all students.”
“...”
“Students.”
“...”
“Your perception had been contaminated. Perfectly normal students had looked like mutated Chimeras to you. You personally tore a hundred perfectly normal students to death. You collapsed right there. The other staff members, whose curses had also been lifted, reacted the same way. The two of them lost their minds and screamed at you. They berated you and cried out as if placing all the blame on you. They said you should have retreated like they had told you to. They said the students would not have died if you had hesitated for even ten minutes before acting. And you came to share their accusations.”
An irreversible tragedy.
Something that was no one’s fault.
Yet Javert could not help but be consumed by guilt.
“I should have hesitated longer. I should have retreated for a moment. I should have only subdued them. I shouldn’t have followed the rules... You were tormented by thoughts like those. A terrible sense of guilt choked you, and your obsession with principles became hopelessly tangled. You spent your whole life following principles, but in the end, that very fixation ruined everything.”
“...”
“You killed yourself a few days later.”
“...”
Javert Droit.
That was all I knew about the woman’s story.
Her green eyes stared at me blankly, trembling.
“...That.”
“Does it sound like a lie?”
Clap.
I lightly brought my hands together.
Right after that, hazy scenes poured into the air.
Ding-!
[You have already cleared the phenomenon ‘Regret (SS-)’!]
[You have gained an authority usable within Purgatory.]
[You may now influence another person’s trauma, including memory sharing, scene modification, and limited manipulation.]
Memory sharing.
I showed the woman several scenes.
I conveyed the memories I had mentioned directly.
I mixed in slight edits and shared them as though they were a future I had personally seen.
Hundreds of scenes unfolded.
Countless routes, stories that progressed in slightly different ways.
Yet the ending Javert Droit reached was always the same.
-I thought principles were everything.
-...Now, I don’t know anything anymore.
I’m sorry.
The messages repeated, ending and cutting off over and over.
Perhaps the flood of memories was too much.
Javert staggered as if she were about to retch.
In the end, the woman always regretted clinging to principles.
“What is this...?”
“Investigator.”
Javert seemed choked up.
The tangled mass of questions must have filled her throat completely.
Purgatory, the future, Blue Night... Countless words lay scattered through her mind.
The memories that had flowed into her mind were far too vivid.
“...You.”
Silence.
Questions and confusion churned into nausea.
Only after several minutes did Javert part her lips.
“How do you have all these memories...?”
She was asking about me.
Our gazes crossed in the darkness.
“I.”
I opened my mouth to answer her.
There was something else I had to confess.
Something about myself.
To save the woman.
“I know this world’s future.”
I decided to be a little more sincere.
Footnotes:
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