Chapter 38: Love
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 38: Love
The man charged.
He must have had professional training. From a dead stop, he took just one step and instantly accelerated to top speed.
That was why I couldn't react to his movements. He went from zero to a hundred in an instant; my eyes couldn't keep up.
But that was only from my perspective as a human.
“Hah, honestly... Just because he can't see me, does he think I'm a joke?”
It seemed it wasn't that fast by Margaret the witch's standards. She muttered as much and unleashed a powerful spell.
It was the same space magic she had used before on Hekaterina, the witch in the Holy Knight uniform. An instant-kill attack that could obliterate a target's body parts in a flash shot toward the man.
But the moment the magic struck the man's head, space itself distorted as if pixelated and deflected the spell.
“Huh? Wh-what?”
As Margaret let out a bewildered cry, startled that her magic had no effect, I quickly rushed forward and swung my own sword at his.
A mass-produced blade I'd bought while wandering the city.
My steel sword clashed against his, which was also made of steel. And yet, for some reason, his felt harder.
Clang—! Kang!
After we exchanged a couple of blows in an instant, the man used some kind of trick, a deceptively swift movement that sent my sword flying.
Having knocked my sword away, the man scowled and glared at the spot where Margaret was.
“What are you doing? Kill me already, witch.”
Then, he thrust his sword lightly toward me. I barely managed to twist my body and deflect the blade, but I failed to dodge it completely.
The blade grazed the back of my neck, and I realized just how terrifying it was to have a long piece of steel aimed at your life, and how horrible it felt for it to actually make contact.
‘Ah, fuck this...!’
Dodging a second time seemed impossible. The man immediately withdrew his sword and prepared his next attack. Sensing death, I squeezed my eyes shut, and just like before, the man's entire body distorted with a staticky mosaic.
It wasn't an attack that could defeat him, but it succeeded in stopping his movements for a moment—so I immediately pulled back.
When the man's body, which had briefly frozen, returned to normal, he scowled and shouted.
“—Pathetic. Is this all you can do? Was knocking me out back then just a fluke?”
“What's he saying?”
“I have no idea.”
“Is he crazy...? Well, whatever. I think I've figured it out. That guy's secret.”
Margaret said, then gestured toward the man as if to test her theory. At that, the man's body, which had just been glitching, moved backward.
Seeing this, Margaret began to grin, confirming her suspicion. Unable to contain my curiosity, I asked her.
“What did you do?”
“It seems that attacks don't work on him. Whether it's simply blowing his head off with magic, burying him in the ground, or throwing him high into the sky—if there's any intent to kill, it's completely ineffective, right?”
“Yeah. So?”
“So this time, I tried moving him backward without any intention of killing him. And ta-da—he moved!”
And that fact led to one conclusion: we didn't need to fight him. We could just run far away.
As long as Margaret, the Witch of Space, was with me, he could never catch us. Every time he found us, she could just send him flying.
“Alright, let's get out of here.”
“...No. Let's not run.”
“What? You want to fight that thing?”
I nodded. Running away when we'd done nothing wrong was a blow to my pride, but more importantly... he was the type to become even more persistent if you ran from him once.
A guy who wouldn't shy away from any means to achieve his goal. Rather than leaving him to plot who-knows-what, it was better to finish him when I had the chance.
But Margaret shook her head, disagreeing.
“I told you already. All attacks miss.”
“But... I knocked him out last time, didn't I? My attacks must work on him.”
If his immunity to attacks was the result of a witch's curse, then to me, who could nullify any magic, he was nothing more than a slightly large and fast punching bag.
Convinced, I whispered my plan to Margaret. Hearing it, she grinned as if it sounded fun.
The man, who had been some distance away, was suddenly right in front of us, but it didn't matter. The magic had already been cast.
The surrounding scenery changed in an instant, and we were back home.
“Teacheeeeeeeeeeeer—!!!”
That is, to the cabin where the world's strongest witch lived.
“Help meeeeeeeeeee!!”
KABOOOOOM—!!
The cabin exploded, and my teacher shot out from within.
The scenery changed. Ludwig, who had thought they were running away, was relieved to find Yohan still standing before him.
If the enemy witch possessed the power to leap through space, it would be impossible for him to pursue them.
‘...Magic that leaps through space? Then how did she bypass my curse—’
One magic per person. It could be applied in various ways, but it could not exceed its fundamental category. No matter how he thought about it, it was impossible to nullify the magic of immortality cast upon him with something like space magic.
Wasn't it an invincible magic that made even the blades of Holy Knights miss? The worst kind of curse, one that had forcibly extended his life for hundreds of years.
But he had no time to dwell on such thoughts. The man he was chasing, Yohan, suddenly screamed.
“Teacher—!! Help me!”
As he shouted, the sound of an explosion echoed from the distance. At the same time, someone landed in front of him.
A woman with voluminous silver hair and a curvaceous figure. Her beautiful appearance combined exquisitely to exude an aura so grotesquely repulsive it made his skin crawl.
From the discrepancy between the information he saw with his eyes and what registered in his brain, Ludwig realized the woman before him was a witch.
Evangeline, who had appeared at the cry for help, pointed at Ludwig and asked.
“Is it him?”
“Yep! And he's under a spell that makes attacks ineffective!”
“Hah, a spell that makes attacks ineffective?”
Evangeline bloomed a mocking smile and pointed a finger at Ludwig. In response, all of creation began to turn against him.
Gravity, the air, the wind, the sunlight, the birds flying by, the ground he stood on, the surrounding trees and their leaves, the insects crawling on those leaves, and even the microorganisms living as parasites inside those insects—.
The entire planet became his enemy.
It was an attack that could kill him just for breathing. The moment Ludwig took a shallow breath, he felt his body flinch to a halt.
It was the unique filtering process of the immortality magic cast upon him. When faced with a fatal attack, his movements would stop like this as he gained immunity to it.
However, for some reason, his body kept stuttering to a halt.
Evangeline did not miss the opening this created.
“How dare you target my Yohan?”
Countless mana shells formed above her head. It was a simple and brutish attack, just condensed mana fired off, but its power was undeniable.
With a gesture from Evangeline, the mana shells shot toward Ludwig, boasting enough destructive force to tear the earth asunder, and instantly engulfed his body.
“That's the end of that.”
Having dealt with Ludwig in an instant, Evangeline turned around.
After dispatching Ludwig with an overwhelming attack, Evangeline immediately ran toward Yohan.
“Yohaaaaan—! Teacher took care of him! Are you hurt anywhere!?”
“...Teacher. Did you say you took care of him?”
“Hm? Oh! There's no one who could survive that attack...”
“He's not dead yet! Don't let your guard down! Defend, defend!”
Evangeline was baffled by the claim that he hadn't died from that attack, but she chose to trust her disciple, even if it meant being deceived, rather than doubt him.
She turned back again to face the direction of her attack. Through the thick clouds of dust, a lone shadow began to trudge forward.
“It's not you, either.”
Ludwig emerged, completely unscathed without a single scratch, and glared fiercely at Yohan.
“Then is the secret with you?”
“...Yes.”
“I had the wrong address from the start. To think I almost killed the one person who could break my curse with my own hands... No, is this, too, part of the curse?”
Ludwig said with a bitter smile. He directly resisted all forms of death, but if an unavoidable death were to come, the curse would prevent the situation from ever occurring in the first place.
If fate decreed he would be buried in an earthquake, it would divert the earthquake elsewhere or prevent him from going to that location—it would even meddle with fate itself to protect him.
This time must have been the same. Meeting someone who could nullify his curse was, in effect, no different from facing a mortal crisis.
So the curse must have driven him to try and kill Yohan with his own hands, to escape from death. Even though that death was what he truly desired...
“My apologies. So... would you kill me?”
“...And if I say no?”
“I will make you hate me enough to want to kill me.”
“We could just send you somewhere very, very far away from here, you know?”
“Even if it takes years, decades, I will find you. If you are dead, I will find the witches here and kill them. No, killing them won't be enough. I will rape and defile them until you regret not having killed me then—”
“Why go that far?”
My teacher, who had been listening quietly to Ludwig, tilted her head and looked at him, as if asking why he needed to go to such lengths.
Hearing her, Ludwig must have thought that explaining would make them willing to kill him, because he began to tell his story.
“—I was a Holy Knight.”
“...A Holy Knight? Looking like that?”
“Yes. A very old and ancient Holy Knight—who fought in the Holy War hundreds of years ago to kill the Immortal Witch.”
Was meant he wasn't a Holy Knight anymore. It made sense—even Yohan could see that the existence of an undying, immortal being among the clergy who served God would not be looked upon favorably.
The Church would have either imprisoned him for life or tried to find a way to kill him. The fact that he was here now meant they had failed.
“As you well know, I succeeded in killing the Immortal Witch.”
“...I know. Her death was quite a shock, even among us.”
“As she died, she said this to me. ‘Live in my stead.’”
“...Huh?”
But something was strange. The Immortal Witch telling a Holy Knight to live in her place? Witches didn't grow pessimistic just because their lives were long.
Unlike humans, who aged and grew sick after living for a while, they didn't easily grow old or ill—nor did they try to end their lives because of something like depression. There was no reason for her to leave behind words telling the Holy Knight who came to kill her to live...
“Thanks to that, the woman I loved left me behind and departed. I wandered for hundreds of years to see her again, but I never could. Because she was already dead.”
Hearing that, Yohan's jaw dropped. The story had suddenly veered into a romance drama.
And he began to cautiously glance at Evangeline.
“Now, a way has finally appeared for me to perhaps meet her again. Kill me, and let me see her once more. I... I want to be with her again.”
A sweet love story. One so sorrowful it could bring one to tears...
And Evangeline, the Witch of Love, had a soft spot for these kinds of love stories.
“Yohan. Can't we... do something?”
To the point where she would listen to an enemy's plea.