Chapter 38
Chapter 38
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 38
Chapter Title: Sudden Explosions
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5
BOOM! Crash! KABOOM!!
Explosions hammered the air one after another.
Each time, the ground shook as if an earthquake had struck.
Screams tangled chaotically from all directions.
I instinctively dropped into a low stance.
Leon and Ethan did the same, craning their necks to assess the situation.
“What’s going on!?”
“Explosions!”
“Explosions out of nowhere…!”
That’s what I wanted to know too.
We had prevented the bombing the Karmut Federation spies were supposed to carry out.
With the liaison eliminated, they had no time to revise the false operation I’d fed them back to the original plan.
Since I’d used a fake of the Five Great Swords, the odds of the spies falling for it were approaching zero.
So what were these explosions?
It couldn’t be ruled out as an unlucky accident rather than terrorism.
But my intuition, transcending logic, screamed that this was no mere incident.
The reason for the explosions remained unknown.
What was certain, however, was something else.
“If we leave this alone, the casualties will spiral out of control.”
Unlike usual, Esterro Academy was open to outside visitors right now.
Even an incident of the same scale would cause several times the damage under these conditions.
“There are the most people at the club booths. The exhibition hall, auditorium, and cafeteria should be manageable with the dorm staff. We need to evacuate the people here first.”
“I know the evacuation spots, so leave it to me!”
“I’ll help too. Every hand counts right now.”
Ethan and Leon nodded.
I left them and bolted in the opposite direction.
“Theo!”
Leon called out, but I had no time to stop.
What I needed first was information.
Louis would know something, at least.
Louis Lefersha hadn’t betrayed me, at minimum.
That was an unshakable fact.
He gained nothing from revealing my plan to the spies.
If anything, by exposing the spy hideout to the enemy, he’d only made himself more vulnerable.
Above all, the Louis Lefersha I’d personally confirmed in Bayford… wouldn’t actively endorse a method causing mass casualties like this unless it was a unilateral order from above.
Otherwise, there’d be no need for him to push food to starving kids, empathize with others’ pain and aid in the king zinger subjugation, or join hands with me to capture the liaison.
Every moment Louis Lefersha had shown was sincere, without a shred of deceit.
I pushed through the panicked crowd.
The explosions and tremors were distant.
But there was no guarantee the next one wouldn’t hit nearby.
Suppressing my anxiety and fear, I ran.
I scanned the fleeing masses for Louis’s face.
My mouth grew parched as I struggled to spot him. Then I saw him emerging from the dorm building.
“Senior Louis!”
I sprinted straight to him.
I grabbed his shoulder.
“How did… this… happen?”
My breath came in gasps.
Even suppressing my ragged breathing was a struggle.
I barely managed to spit out the words.
“We definitely changed the mission… so how are there explosions…?”
“You, huh?”
Louis suddenly grinned wickedly.
A strange sensation crawled up my spine, and I staggered back.
My instincts rang alarm bells wildly at the gut feeling that something was wrong.
“You… Senior Louis, you….”
Stab!
I didn’t even have time to draw Deathwise.
The assassin wearing Louis’s face thrust a dagger at me.
Caught off guard by the surprise attack, I clutched my gut and collapsed to my knees.
Blood dripped from my hand, soaking the ground.
Dizzying pain bleached my vision white.
“This is the price for ruining the grand plan.”
The assassin’s emotionless voice sounded distant.
6
“Must be nice… everyone… at the festival…….”
In Professor Edmund Clayton’s research lab.
Clara listlessly handled research materials in the place called Esterro’s lighthouse, where the lights never went out 365 days a year, 24 hours a day.
“I wanted to go too… the festival…….”
She had once been a student at Esterro Academy.
She should have been enjoying the prime of her youth, but one day she came to her senses and found herself living as a lab ghost.
Beyond the door, the festival—youth’s grandest event—was in full swing.
Yet here she was, cooped up alone, sorting research materials.
Even Edmund Clayton himself hadn’t shown up at the lab today….
“I want a festival too… food stalls… games and exhibits… I want to do nothing and just soak in the vibes, wasting time…….”
It was all pointless lamenting.
She knew that better than anyone, so with hollow eyes, Clara methodically organized the sorted research materials.
Thud!
A heavy sound echoed from outside the window.
The lab vibrated faintly, but Clara didn’t notice.
“Fireworks already…? That’s bad… I haven’t finished yet…….”
She muttered.
KABOOM!! Another explosion rang out.
This one was closer, the shockwave rattling the lab violently.
Books tumbled from shelves, and items crashed from the desk to the floor.
Now it would be weirder if she didn’t know.
Stunned by the intense blast, Clara froze, forgetting even to scream.
Boom!!
The third explosion snapped her out of it.
Finally grasping the severity, Clara sprang from her seat.
“The research materials…! The research materials…!!”
Instead of fleeing immediately, she stuffed the freshly sorted materials into a leather bag, clutched it preciously to her chest, and bolted from the lab.
Escaping the main building was easy.
The problem was the path from the main building to the front gate, completely choked with people.
Before she got trapped, Clara veered toward the dorm building.
There was a shelter beyond it.
‘If it’s the shelter, I can keep the materials safe…!’
With that sole thought, Clara dashed to the dorm building.
There, right in front of it, she spotted a familiar face.
Theo Agrit.
A student her advisor, Edmund Clayton, showed great interest in.
With his deep knowledge of rune magic, he was a talent even Clara coveted.
Seeing that face, approaching was instinctual.
Theo Agrit was talking to someone.
Soon, he clutched his stomach and dropped to his knees.
Clara couldn’t help crying out at the blood dripping from his hand.
“Student Theo!?”
Hearing her, the conversant glanced at Clara and hurriedly slipped away.
Clara rushed to Theo.
“Are you okay!?”
“Teaching Assistant Clara…?”
Theo staggered to his feet.
His left hand hung limp, dropping the dagger to the ground.
Blood still dripped steadily from his hand.
“Huh, what? It sure felt like I got stabbed in the gut….”
“I grabbed it before it could. This… hurts way more than it looks…….”
Not reaching for Deathwise was sheer luck.
Right before the stab, Theo had seized the dagger with his hand.
His left hand suffered a deep gash, but he’d avoided a gut wound.
Had Clara not appeared then, the assassin would’ve finished him off, but that too was pure fortune.
“First aid at least…!”
Clara pulled out a handkerchief and wrapped his hand.
She tied it tight for pressure, distorting Theo’s face in pain.
“The rest at the shelter….”
“No, I… have something to do. You go first, Teaching Assistant Clara.”
“What are you talking about? Explosions everywhere, and you’ve been stabbed!”
“I don’t know what’ll happen if I’m not there. I have to go now.”
Theo Agrit didn’t budge an inch.
Even as he gripped the blood-soaked handkerchief, face twisted in agony, his voice held firm.
“The library will be safest for the research materials.”
With that curt addition, Theo Agrit started running.
It was an unyieldingly tough attitude unlike the Theo Agrit she’d seen early in the semester.
Clara couldn’t bring herself to stop him.
Instead, she clutched the bag of research materials and ran toward the library.
7
“Damn… hurts…….”
Protagonists in stories run around fine even after getting shot or stabbed.
But grabbing a real blade? It hurts like hell.
Every step sent dizzying pain surging up my throat with bile.
At least the handkerchief stanched the bleeding enough to numb some sensation—or maybe my brain was pumping out natural opioids—but the pain was gradually easing.
On top of that, my focus shifted entirely from the pain to elsewhere.
While stabbing me, the assassin had coolly explained his grand plan and all that.
This confirmed several facts.
This terrorism wasn’t the Federation acting alone from the start.
It was a scheme pushed by collaboration between the assassin’s organization and the Federation.
That’s why, even though I’d completely fooled the Karmut Federation spies, the truth must’ve come out during coordination with the organization.
This part was completely unexpected.
Those spies at the hideout had just been pawns.
The real boss running that hideout existed separately and was the only one coordinating with the organization.
“Damn it, what a trash game! Hiding a setting like this…!”
It had never been mentioned in the game.
Louis didn’t know the operation details either, so there’d been no reason to suspect.
If that’s all, maybe I should count myself lucky.
The organization employing the assassin was almost certainly the Precursors.
No hard evidence, just circumstantial, but the context made it certain.
I’d pinned down the enemy’s identity.
Calling that fortunate would be way too optimistic.
The Corbus Family, Bayford’s mayor Liam Duncan, coordinating with Karmut Federation spies.
If all these successive incidents were the Precursors’ doing, their reach and influence were beyond imagination.
This event, and the Precursors’ power shown in the actual Broken World storyline, were just the tip of the iceberg.
Facing such enemies naturally complicated everything.
“Whatever. That’s not what matters now.”
The most important thing wasn’t later, but right now.
I had to end this chaos.
No more overconfidence thinking I knew everything.
What lay before me was the backstory hidden behind the Broken World tale.
Not the glittering, beautiful stage, but what lurked behind it.
Who among the audience grasps every detail of the backstage frenzy?
I didn’t know the full backstage story.
So I’d take what I could, discard what I must, focus on the variables at hand, and tackle the incident head-on.
BOOM!!
An explosion roared from the auditorium and student cafeteria.
Since that was the top priority.
I turned my steps toward the blast site.