Chapter 21
Chapter 21
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>Translator: Lord First
>Chapter: 21
>Chapter Title: Confession
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*
There's a term called confirmation bias. It refers to the tendency to selectively interpret information to fit one's own views.
In other words, once the suspicion took root, it became unbearable. That was exactly Enrique's situation right now.
"That crazy bastard looks dangerous."
Four days. For four days, the kid had been lying in wait, chewing on dry rations.
When she had first joined the assassination squad, Enrique had taught her disciples about ‘patience.’ To stand still and observe the target, whether it rained or insects landed on them.
This wasn't what she meant for it to be used for.
Unlike her, a vampire, that boy was human. It meant that, unlike her, who had no inherent weaknesses besides sunlight and holy blessings, there were things essential for his survival. (And Enrique was an elder, resistant to the sun.)
Basic things like sleep, food, and rest.
Enrique narrowed her eyes, glaring at Ivan, before letting out a deep sigh.
At her age, having to look after a guy that old. If this was a joke, it was a malicious one.
"Hey, disciple."
“…”
Ivan stood like a stone statue, unresponsive. He was so focused that he couldn't even detect her voice from this distance.
Was he lip-reading? What a tiresome thing to do for so long.
Enrique shrugged and slipped a hand into her sleeve.
*-Click. Bang—!*
She fired the pistol. A perfect execution, with no momentum in the movement. A steady line of fire, aimed squarely at the back of his head.
Ivan tilted his head to dodge, then leaped down from the tree, axe in hand.
"Enrique...?"
"That's right, kid. Let's get out of here first. Someone heard that gunshot, and who knows what kind of trouble will come sniffing around. Let's go to your place."
"It's a little inconvenient right now."
"It's very inconvenient for me. Liza will cry again if she finds out about this. Let's go, I'll check out your orphanage while we're at it."
Enrique grabbed Ivan firmly by the scruff of his neck and dragged him away. Ivan glanced at her face and put his axe away.
His grand-teacher was a frivolous and slightly mad woman, but she wasn't one to speak nonsense.
So, he might as well hear what was so urgent. Ivan naturally slipped out of Enrique's grasp and led the way.
"It might be a bit messy."
"Yeah, yeah. Let's just go."
*
A short while later, Enrique set foot in Ivan's orphanage for the first time.
Her first impression was one of bewilderment.
"You're not actually raising an assassination squad, are you?"
"That's a misunderstanding."
"Really...?"
Enrique stared blankly around. From the littlest toddlers to the older kids about to graduate, they were all here. The children pattered about, yet their footsteps made no sound.
Even in her organization, such discipline was hard to find. What on earth had this kid been doing? Enrique let out an empty laugh.
"If you have a curriculum, share it with me. I can't even get my kids to be like this."
"Provide them with a regular lifestyle and a nutritionally balanced diet."
"What kind of crazy talk is that, you brat."
Enrique chuckled and continued walking, only to stop again.
"What's that over there? Isn't that a demon?"
"It is."
"Of all the things...! Do you have any idea that if this gets out, you, him, and this whole place will be dead?"
"I am aware."
Ivan shrugged. In the distance, Eiphelos was teaching the children something.
One of the children ran forward, *dodo-do*, and planted a fist in Eiphelos's side. It was an incredible feat. It meant the child had succeeded in a close-quarters surprise attack on a centurion who had survived on battlefields for some thirty years.
The child shouted, "Hooray!" and ran off again, *dodo-do*. In an instant, he was out of sight.
"Everyone deserves a chance to live like a human being."
Hearing Ivan's words, Enrique narrowed her eyes. He had taken in a demon, yet he was preparing to ambush students.
"We're here."
Ivan silently opened the door to the director's office. The room was dark, the curtains drawn.
Enrique took a step forward, then froze. A thin booby trap was stretched out right before her foot.
There were dozens of them. A single ray of sunlight filtering through the curtains revealed them like a spider's web.
"What is all this...?"
Even without light, a vampire had dark vision. This meant that blackout curtains were useless for concealing the room's interior.
The booby traps could be dismissed as paranoid security measures.
But this.
"Seriously, what have you been doing with your life?"
Ivan said nothing and began to disarm the traps. One by one, he released the mechanisms connected to the strings, then touched a light fixture in the corner of the office.
With a *flick*, the mana lamp cast a blue glow, illuminating the room.
The interior was a mess.
*
Dozens of document bundles. Profiles filled with neat handwriting. Slips of paper with names written on them, connected by red string.
Memos were invariably placed where these spiderwebs of information converged. Reading them one by one, they seemed to be ordinary conversations.
But they were the kind of things that shouldn't be ordinary. The circumstances of a conversation someone had, their predicted tone of voice, the meaning between the lines, and intonations inferred from observing the movement of the hyoid bone. A list of possible regions of origin based on those intonations...
Not even the Counter-Espionage Command would go to such lengths when tracking an international criminal on red alert.
And all this for a student.
Alone, without sleep, for days on end.
Enrique's face grew harder and harder. This situation, this scene, this behavior—it was all familiar to her.
This was the sign of a mental illness. Something akin to a panic attack. Or perhaps something much older.
The kind you sometimes see in those who've spent too long on the battlefield. Not exactly a rare type.
But as precarious as a ticking time bomb... Even now, Frichenkaia was crawling with drug-addicted veterans who wandered the streets in a similar state.
Enrique took a deep breath.
"Ivan."
"Mm."
"Sit down."
Ivan's face remained expressionless. She could almost perfectly picture the expression he wore beneath that dreadful beard.
As if it were the most natural thing in the world, he felt nothing was wrong.
"When was the last time you slept?"
"...It's been about six days, I think."
The last time he'd fallen asleep, he'd had a nightmare amidst a pile of files.
It had been a truly terrible feeling, and since then, he had intentionally avoided sleep. One could call it a superhuman will.
But Enrique looked at him with bitter eyes.
"Talk to me. What is all this? When Dmitry asked me to look after you, I thought you were trying to protect the kids."
It was only natural, as he seemed to be following only the children of the Hero's Party. And that was something to be grateful for. It meant he cared enough about the children to personally step up even after retirement.
But the traces here suggested otherwise.
"Who are you trying to catch? The Saint Yansk University terrorist?"
"No."
"Tell me. Just be honest. I get it by now. Your way with words is absolutely terrible. Just start from the beginning, disciple."
Enrique gripped Ivan's hand tightly and looked him straight in the eye.
Indeed, the old monster possessed a persuasiveness as heavy as the years she had lived.
Ivan met her earnest gaze, then let out a sigh.
A moment later, Ivan's mouth opened.
It was a grand confession.
*
What if, just what if, there was a person like this?
A person who left behind the place they lived and the people they knew, and was dropped, just like that, into a world they had never seen before.
So, for instance...
Like someone who loved a novel so much they stayed up all night reading it, dozed off, and woke up in a dream, dropped into the world of that novel.
No matter how hard they try, they can't wake up from the dream, and the world still feels like a story from the book.
Not wanting to die, or perhaps wanting to go back, they try to do everything they can. Fortunately, they seem to have a talent for it and manage to adapt well.
After experiencing the novel up to its final page, that person might have a thought.
-Why isn't it ending?
Perhaps there's another condition. Considering that suicide might be the most likely solution, they decide to observe the situation for a few years.
In the midst of that, someone just pops up.
Probably a stranger from the same homeland.
Now, he starts to think.
Is this world truly just a world inside a novel? Was everything I experienced merely a prologue to the story? On a page of the novel that kid read, will my name be there?
If it is, if that's the case.
What will my end look like? A tragedy? A comedy? No, before that.
Are my life and I nothing more than a single line of backstory? Am I just a character, stuffed and mounted outside of the newly unfolding story?
Such thoughts.
He continued, his words growing more and more disjointed, yet his eyes held a look of conviction as he stared directly at his teacher.
With as much kindness as he could muster, enough to make even this pre-modern fossil understand.
*
"...So. Let me get this straight... You're saying you're actually a transmigrator."
"Mm."
"And you recently confirmed there's another one."
"Mm."
"And you've decided you have to kill him."
"...Mm."
"That's just wonderfully logical, my dear disciple."
Enrique let out a deep sigh and ran a hand over her face. She leaned back on the sofa and stared at the ceiling for a moment.
Dammit, there were memos stuck to the ceiling too. She wondered how he even managed that.
"There's so much I want to say, but I should probably apologize first. I thought you had followed us all the way to the Demon King's Tower."
She had spent so much time with him that she had naturally assumed he had climbed the tower with them.
It was Enrique's mistake. In truth, it was everyone's mistake. The excuse that they didn't know his condition was meaningless. They had taken him in as a disciple, yet they had all but abandoned him.
"The Demon King's Tower?"
"Yes. Strangely, we all thought of you as part of the same party, but now that I think about it, that wasn't the case. We just assumed you knew, so we never bothered to mention it."
Enrique paused for a moment, then shook her head.
"Max isn't from Tyles."
"You mean his nationality is different? But..."
"No. Listen to me first. Max... Maximilian. That boy isn't from this world."
Enrique looked Ivan straight in the face and spoke, biting off each word as if to carve them directly into his mind.
"You're not the first. And you won't be the last."
*
She had casually used his term, ‘transmigrator.’
But to be more precise, they weren't transmigrators, but ‘those who were pulled here.’
That is, when the scales of the world tipped, one or two of them would pop up from somewhere.
It wasn't a common occurrence, but they appeared without fail once or twice a century.
Appearing as if to spice up a world in chaos, they would commit ‘something’ and then disappear.
Enrique knew of such people. She had even met a few of them.
Maximilian. That man was one of them.
He was an ordinary man who missed his home, yet commendably, he had marched onto the battlefield.
That was why even she, a vampire, had followed him. That was the kind of man he was. He stood before everyone, smiling, and made them all follow.
Hero, Champion, Demon King Slayer, and an ordinary man. A lonely stranger to the very end. Now gone.
That was how Enrique remembered him.
A brave stranger who had drawn his sword to protect a commoner girl who had taken him in in Tyles.
"That's why we don't say a Hero is 'born.' We say one 'appears,' don't we?"
*