An Ominous Foreboding
High-tier NPCs radiated intimidation simply by stepping into the frame.
When that NPC happened to be Hero Ishtar, hailed as the undisputed powerhouse of the 981st cohort, the pressure was beyond description.
The fine hairs along my neck stood on end, and the back of my hand tingled. Where her gaze fell, the air prickled against my skin like heat from an open flame, fanning a sudden, competitive spark deep in my chest. Man, do I want to scrap with her right now.
Yet I knew better.
Picking a fight with a Hero using my starter stats was pure suicide.
Even if my raw strength could hold its own in the Upper Class, my other attributes were nowhere near competitive against the monstrous stat pools of major playable characters.
So, I turned around with my best customer service smile.
"Hero-unnie! What brings you all the way out here?"
I had sweetened my tone to lower her guard, but Ishtar's expression only stiffened.
"I see... You underwent bloodlust resistance training to the point where an aura like this doesn't even make you flinch. An assassin cannot afford to freeze in real combat, after all."
"Well... yeah, something along those lines! I'm pretty well adapted to it!"
Tough crowd.
Far from easing her guard, her suspicion spiked through the roof.
Why was she acting like this?
I hadn't built negative rapport with Ishtar. In fact, she was the one who tried to recruit me into her party not long ago. Could she really be holding a grudge just because I turned down her invitation?!
It wasn't impossible.
NPC personalities weren't entirely fixed across every run. A character whose family thrived in one playthrough might be the sweetest, most helpful friend, while in another run where their house went bankrupt, they could turn into a prickly, hyper-aggressive nightmare you dared not even talk to.
"Orknodi. Answer the question I am about to ask with complete honesty. Trust me, this will not be to your detriment."
"What is it, then?"
"Do you not wish to break free from the Foundation's clutches?"
"Huh?"
"The Weihimhai Foundation. No matter how I look at it, the education they subjected you to defies all common decency."
Ishtar began listing off the rumors she had caught wind of.
"I am told the Foundation forces poison upon children who fail to keep up with their brutal regimens, and those who refuse to endure the agony are sold off to brothels or workhouses."
"Gasp. Really?!"
"Do not speak as if it has nothing to do with you! You are no different, Orknodi. At such a tender age, you were forced through environmental conditioning, poison and resistance drills, acrobatics, and every manner of assassination training."
Throwing out accusations like that straight to someone's face was beyond rude.
What did she take me for, an abuse victim?
"That's not true! Don't you dare talk bad about Papa's foundation! I never went through any horrific training like that!"
"...Liar. With rumors this pervasive, there is no way they are mere fabrications."
"The only reason I got this strong is because I genuinely loved doing every single bit of that training! Why on earth would anyone force themselves to do something they hate?!"
The Hero's face went completely blank. Her fingers trembled violently against the hilt of her sword. Look at this petty brat—is she actually fuming because I refused to badmouth the Foundation?!
I must have rolled the toxic, sociopathic variant of the Hero in this playthrough.
Right now, she was cornering me—the daughter of the Boss—demanding that I slander my own father's organization, implicitly threatening to cut me down if I refused. That was what this came down to, wasn't it?
Hmph.
If she thought flexing her muscles would make me fold, she had picked the wrong girl.
My policy was strictly hard on the strong, hard on the weak. I didn't back down from anyone, top tier or bottom feeder.
"If you insult the Foundation and Papa again, I don't care if you're the Hero—I won't let it slide."
"Haah... Are you truly serious right now? You are standing before the contemporary Hero, the one destined to become the greatest prodigy of our era."
"A nasty hero who tries to force unfilial conduct on someone has no right to call herself a hero at all!"
"Is that how it is..."
Ishtar let out a hollow, defeated sigh.
It looked like she didn't intend to throw hands right this second.
Phew.
Just as I caught my breath, the Hero turned on her heel.
"If that is your resolve, there is nothing more to say. My words came from a place of goodwill, but if they offended you, I apologize."
All she did was march over here and demand I disown my family. Goodwill? What part of that was goodwill?!
This playthrough's Ishtar was certified trash tier in personality!
"Hmph. Whatever, just hurry up and leave. You're interrupting our training."
"Is that boy training of his own free will as well?"
Mob piped up from the ground in a dying wheeze.
"No more... Please, save me..."
"...Orknodi. I apologize, but I must ask you to release him. As the Hero, I cannot turn a blind eye to someone pleading for help right before my eyes."
"Tsk, unbelievable. He was the one who begged me for help in the first place."
Grumbling under my breath, I unfastened Mob's gear, and only then did the Hero finally take her leave.
Annoying nuisance. If Mob ends up flunking, it's all your fault!
Ishtar could not suppress the sinking horror clutching at her chest.
The Sole God who had anointed her as the chosen champion was Sophemia of the Sun.
And within the holy sword bestowed upon her by Sophemia lay a sacred authority: the power to discern all falsehoods.
"I see... You underwent bloodlust resistance training to the point where an aura like this doesn't even make you flinch. An assassin cannot afford to freeze in real combat, after all."
"Well... yeah, something along those lines! I'm pretty well adapted to it!"
Her lie detection had not triggered in the slightest.
"That's not true! Don't you dare talk bad about Papa's foundation! I never went through any horrific training like that!"
Truth.
"The only reason I got this strong is because I genuinely loved doing every single bit of that training! Why on earth would anyone force themselves to do something they hate?!"
She had truly, genuinely welcomed the horrific abuse with open joy.
'She was conditioned from far too young an age.'
Before she could even develop natural likes and dislikes.
Engineered to perceive agonizing torment as delight.
The Foundation had remolded the very foundation of the girl's psyche, warping her innocent preferences into something grotesque and inhuman.
It was already too late.
On the surface, she appeared to be nothing more than an innocent, adorable child, but beneath that exterior lay a shattered mind that regarded lethal conditioning as an amusing playground game.
Murder.
Assassination.
There was no doubt she viewed those horrors through the exact same twisted lens.
"If you insult the Foundation and Papa again, I don't care if you're the Hero—I won't let it slide."
Truth.
"A nasty hero who tries to force unfilial conduct on someone has no right to call herself a hero at all!"
Truth.
She possessed neither admiration nor fear for the Hero.
To her, making an enemy of the Hero was simply a matter of course—as if she took it for granted that the day would come when they stood on opposing sides.
A dreadful destiny that even fully grown adults shrank from in terror.
Even the leaders of massive syndicates cowered at the thought of drawing the Hero's ire and being branded an evil organization. Yet this tiny girl harbored not a shred of fear.
Because she had never been taught fear.
Because she had been thoroughly conditioned never to feel it.
This child was no mere assassin. She had been nurtured and molded into a candidate for the next Demon King.
"Tsk, unbelievable. He was the one who begged me for help in the first place."
Strapping over fifty kilograms of dead weight onto a peer.
Forcing a classmate to leap through flaming rings.
Demanding that he juggle five razor-sharp daggers while balancing on a suspended tightrope.
It didn't even cross her mind that any of this was wrong.
Because she had endured the exact same trials herself.
Because to her, it was nothing more than basic discipline and lighthearted play.
Her concept of good and evil had been completely blurred.
'I understand now. I must strike her down while she is still weak.'
And yet... could she truly bring herself to execute a child who looked so young and innocent?
If the boundary between good and evil was ambiguous to her, that meant while she could easily descend into wickedness, she might also be guided back toward righteousness.
Perhaps another path existed.
Without killing her.
Without harming her.
Without turning her into an enemy.
Some way to guide that poor child toward the light.
'I need Yupi's counsel.'
Her oldest companion and first comrade, Yupi.
She needed the Saintess's profound understanding and boundless mercy.
Ishtar walked away.
And she made a silent vow.
She would withdraw quietly for now, but next time would be different.
Someday, she would make that pitiable child understand: what she had suffered was neither a game nor training, but horrific abuse; her 'Papa' was no loving father; and the Foundation was an irredeemable den of evil.
"Happy now? Getting out of your special training?"
"I'm sorry, Orknodi... My stamina completely gave out. I couldn't manage another second."
"What a total weakling. Seriously, what did you even eat growing up to be this frail at your age?"
"Black bread and scrap stew...?"
"Ugh. Spoken like a true background extra. Your codex completion rate must be a legendary disaster."
Still, Mob had given it everything he had.
Though he hadn't cleared the entirety of the hellish routine Orknodi laid out, he could feel a distinct difference in his blade. The trajectory of his swings felt uniform, and the tip of his sword no longer wavered in the air.
His body moved exactly as his mind commanded. Where he used to feel that perfect, crisp strike only two or three times out of a hundred swings, that sensation now came once every ten.
Considering all they had done was heavy weight acclimation and bizarre circus acrobatics instead of standard sword drills, he had no earthly clue why he had gotten stronger. But that only made her seem all the more miraculous.
'She didn't claim the top rank of the freshman class for nothing.'
After finishing the hellish session, he had crawled back to the dormitory like a corpse and slept like the dead.
When he woke, his stamina recovery had been strangely accelerated, and his physical condition was so sharp that he felt healthier than he had in years.
The Mana Verification Test.
The dreaded trial where expulsion hung in the balance was right before his eyes.
"Mob. How are you holding up? Word around the halls is that you went through some gruesome training."
"Couldn't be better. Body and mind are in peak condition."
Honestly speaking, no matter what kind of test they threw at him today, he felt confident it would be a walk in the park compared to diving through flaming hoops burdened with fifty kilograms of iron or juggling five razor-sharp daggers on a tightrope.
"Zaku. What about you?"
His longtime friend offered a strangely detached, hollow smile.
"I'm ready too."
"The mentoring helped a lot, didn't it?"
"Yeah. It helped. If only... I had received it just a week earlier..."
"Huh?"
"No. Forget it. It's nothing."
Zaku's complexion looked awful.
Something felt off.
Had Zaku tossed and turned all night?
Mob wanted to press him, to ask if something was weighing on his mind and help ease the tension, but their timing was terrible.
A chorus of heavy footsteps echoed from out in the corridor.
The distinctive clamor heralded the arrival of Professor Van Snake, who notoriously traveled with an excessive entourage of teaching assistants. The sudden commotion stripped away any chance to dispel the sudden dread pooling in Mob's gut.
"Zaku!"
All Mob could do was raise a fist in silent encouragement.
Zaku met his gaze and raised his own fist in return, offering a faint cheer of solidarity.
Rumble.
The lecture hall doors slid open, and the professor finally stepped inside.
There was no escaping the trial now.
"The time has come to prove whether the past four weeks were spent meaningfully, or if you merely squandered them in worthless indulgence. Give it your absolute all."
The mandatory fourth-week Lower Class exam—the Mana Verification Test—had officially begun.