Chapter 79
Chapter 79
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Translator: Ryuma
Chapter: 79
Chapter Title: Chapter 19. How Underachievers Fight (4)
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At that same moment, Stefan Grossman, the one who had led the bullying, was leaving the Cradle.
“Forget everything that happened in the Cradle.”
The Vice Director, who had come to either see him off or supervise him, spoke.
“Just think of it as a fleeting dream on a midsummer night.”
Whether it was a nightmare or a pleasant dream.
He was to treat his memories of the Cradle like a dream forgotten upon waking.
“……”
The blatant warning surely included not only the security oath but also a prohibition on personal revenge against Mage Slayer.
He did not answer.
He merely suppressed the surging despair and anger within him.
Just then, a massive ship appeared with a strange noise.
“Once you descend on that airship, all your ties to the Cradle will be severed.”
A ship that flies in the sky.
It was a vessel Stefan Grossman had never seen or even heard of, but he felt no excitement at all.
Having already seen a massive city floating in the sky, he didn't think a floating ship was any big deal.
Far greater was his anger toward the one who had sent his rosy life plummeting into an abyss in a single moment.
Stefan Grossman inwardly ground his teeth.
Mage Slayer.
If it weren't for that bastard, he wouldn't be in this miserable state.
He believed this and vowed revenge.
It had to be subtle.
When he stood before the disciplinary committee after barely healing his crushed limbs, the man called the chairman had warned him.
Something about facing great disaster if he used his family's influence out of personal feelings to harm a Cradle cadet.
Whether that meant knights from the Cradle would intervene, or the Cradle itself would, Stefan Grossman couldn't tell.
Either way, it was clear that the Grossman family, a mere provincial martial house, would be no match for them.
But the Grossman family had connections.
One of the Empire's Eight Great Sword Families, “Dasmir of the Azure Sea.”
Stefan Grossman's mother was a distant blood relative of the Dasmir family.
His maternal family would surely lend their strength if it was just about making a single cadet pay the price, not confronting the Cradle itself.
Though he would have to pay a considerable sum as compensation.
But what was a bit of wealth when it came to delivering just punishment to the bastard who ruined his son’s life?
Perhaps, if the price was right, the main family might even step in.
He quietly considered it.
Four years? Six?
How long would it take for a newly enrolled cadet to descend to the lower world again?
He didn't know for sure, but it would be more than enough time to prepare his revenge.
The thought of that day was enough to lift his spirits.
That was why.
He didn't even notice someone was staring intently at him.
“Professor Navian, what brings you here?”
Only after hearing the Vice Director's words did Stefan Grossman spot the Black Moon Knight of the Gaznae family, whom he admired so dearly.
“Professor Navian, could it be you came to see me off…”
He forgot even his anger and greeted the knight before him warmly.
“I can see right through what you’re thinking.”
But the warmth was momentary.
“You have Dasmir blood on your mother's side, don't you?”
Her voice, as dry as desert sand, held no emotion.
“You plan to drag those rude pirates into this.”
His thoughts exposed, Stefan flinched and stared at Professor Navian.
He was about to make an excuse.
To say that he was not such a petty person.
But not a single word of the many that rose to his throat could be uttered.
The moment his eyes met her jet-black pupils, a scene surfaced like a vision.
*Fwoosh.*
A sea stained crimson red, a fleet of hundreds of ships with torn sails drifting on the red waters.
The crest engraved on the sails seared into his eyes.
A symbol of a wave and a net. It was the emblem of Dasmir.
As he stared blankly at the wretched state of Dasmir's proud, invincible fleet, a corpse caught his eye.
The face of the man, who had died with his tongue lolling out in terror, was familiar.
It was Stefan Grossman, himself.
“H-Hiiieeeek!”
The moment he realized it, a scream burst out.
A yellow liquid trickled down his trousers.
The way he shrieked nonstop made him look as if he had lost his mind.
“……”
The Vice Director, who had taken a step back to observe them, let out a quiet sigh.
“Didn't you say it would be a welcome event, as you could take him to Gaznae if he were expelled from the Cradle?”
He had known of her affection for Mage Slayer from the start, so he couldn't understand her quiet demeanor throughout the disciplinary committee meeting. When he asked, that was her reply.
Thus, he hadn't considered her intervention when opening the disciplinary committee.
It seemed she had no intention of interfering, no matter the outcome.
“Wasn't using your Simgeom going too far?”
He never imagined she would go so far as to follow the boy on his way out of the Cradle just to get even.
It was clear even at a glance that the damage to his soul was not insignificant.
“It was just one strike.”
The reply was so brazen it could hardly be called an excuse, and the Vice Director frowned.
“It wasn't ‘just one strike,’ it was a strike imbued with the will of the Empire's greatest knight.”
He muttered to himself at her indifference, speaking so lightly of a single strike that even a sworn knight would struggle to withstand.
This is why I hate talking to geniuses.
“I don't know for sure, but it will likely be a very long time before that boy can hold a sword again. Perhaps such a day may never come in his lifetime.”
The latter seemed more likely than the former.
If he were strong-willed enough to overcome a Simgeom deliberately shown by the Empire's greatest knight, he wouldn't have created such problems with other cadets in the first place.
“Is that so.”
Her continued indifference made him flare up.
“It’s not a matter of ‘is that so.’ It wouldn't be strange if he became a complete wreck.”
“Yes. That’s right. You’re correct.”
He regretted his snide remark as soon as he said it, but Professor Navian's reaction was strange.
“To endure something like this several times without issue, now that would be even stranger.”
“Why are you stating something so obvious…?”
“It just struck me as new.”
“……?”
After a brief, cryptic exchange, the Vice Director gestured to the airship's crewman.
The crewman, who had been staring blankly their way, slunk over and tossed Stefan Grossman into the airship like a piece of luggage.
And so, Stefan Grossman was expelled from the Cradle.
But his ordeal was not over.
“Why is the Imperial Family… our family…?”
A visit from an undercover knight specially dispatched by the Imperial Family awaited him.
Neither Stefan Grossman nor his father could understand it.
They couldn't figure out if the man before them was truly an undercover knight, and if he was, what grudge he held to utterly ruin their family, tying in the sins of ancestors from generations ago.
Until the moment all their assets were confiscated and they were thrown out onto the street, the Grossman clan never learned the reason why.
Of course, this was a story that neither the parties involved nor the people of the Cradle could know for the time being.
Not that they would have cared much even if they had known.
***
After seeing Stefan Grossman off (?), the Vice Director grew curious about what the very cause of the freshman's lightning-fast expulsion was doing.
“The group competition should have started by now.”
The training grounds happened to be nearby.
After a moment's thought, he turned his steps.
He didn't really have high expectations.
It was called a group competition, but it had been quite some time since they had seen a heated battle like in the old days.
To be precise, it started about five years ago.
It was after they began dividing the classes into an odd number of groups instead of two even ones.
The intention, at least, was good.
By having three groups of different strengths—strong, medium, and weak—compete, the cadets would be able to experience a wider variety of situations.
But like most armchair theories, the Cradle's newly introduced competition system didn't go as intended.
To achieve victory, one had to boldly break the balance, but the problem was that most attempts to do so ended up being disadvantageous.
In the end, the new system only made the Cradle's cadets more passive.
It was a failed policy by anyone's standards, a regression rather than a change.
Nevertheless, the Operating Committee that controlled the Cradle's systems seemed to have no will to solve the problem.
He had passed on the professors' complaints after they could no longer stand it, but the results were far from satisfactory.
The problem was the closed nature of the Operating Committee itself.
They were the Operating Committee of the Cradle, yet he, with the title of Vice Director, had never even seen their faces.
He didn't even know the committee members' names, let alone meet and talk with them.
Given the circumstances, proper communication was impossible.
Anyway, for that reason, the Vice Director expected the Silver Eagle class's first competition to be as disorganized or sluggish as those of previous classes.
But he was wrong.
“Ooh!”
As soon as he arrived at the training grounds in the old city district, a sudden cheer erupted.
It was undoubtedly the voices of Professor Dieter Rissner, who was in charge of the competition, and his Jogyo.
“……?”
The Vice Director quickened his pace.
And finally, he spotted the two of them crouching on the school grounds.
“They all got wiped out again!”
“Kyah! Seriously, every single scene is a keeper!”
So focused were they that the two were chattering away, completely unaware of the Vice Director's arrival.
*Ssk.*
The Vice Director took a few steps closer.
Only then did he realize the two crouching figures were watching something.
A staff-only terminal.
On the screen, twice as large as a cadet's, blue, yellow, and red dots were constantly clashing and separating.
“Gah!”
“Vice Director…?”
The two jumped in surprise, finally noticing him.
“What on earth are you watching so intently that you don't even notice someone approaching?”
At the Vice Director's question, the Jogyo answered with a flushed face.
“This year's class is insane!”
Unable to understand the explanation, he looked toward the professor.
“There has never been a class in the history of the Cradle with this much fighting spirit.”
But the professor's explanation was just as incomprehensible.
As he frowned in frustration, the Jogyo belatedly added an explanation.
“It hasn't been long since the exercise started, but 17 out of 29 cadets have already been eliminated!”
So, this was roughly the situation.
The members of the three groups were engaged in a chaotic, simultaneous battle all over the field, and no one was holding back, leading to a rapid succession of eliminations.
“What's absurd is that even with all that fighting and the number of eliminations, no one has managed to seize the initiative. It's truly a tense, nail-biting stalemate!”
Hearing only this much, it seemed as though the two were just overly excited about a heated brawl, a rare occurrence lately.
It was uncommon, but not entirely unheard of for a chance encounter to escalate into a full-blown melee, even after the Cradle's policy change.
The Vice Director thought little of it.
But that was a hasty judgment.
“Would you believe it if I told you there are specific individuals who orchestrated this whole interlocking struggle?”
The Vice Director froze.
A question popped into his head.
Could it be that this incident, too, was related to *that* kid?
“Group 3.”
The moment the professor mentioned Group 3, the Vice Director's question turned into certainty.
“The ones who designed this entire battle are the cadets of Group 3.”
The troublemaker, who had been attracting incidents from before he even enrolled until now, had clearly pulled off something outrageous again.