71. Witch Hunt (2)
71. Witch Hunt (2)
"Hey, Reni. Any idea who she is?"
"Not sure. Never seen her before either."
Was she just a student who ended up here somehow? I looked down at the unconscious girl.
Purple hair. Pale skin. A small frame.
At least she did not seem to be a heroine. I remembered no purple-haired heroine. I might simply have forgotten her, but nothing came to mind. In my experience so far, names or faces usually jogged my memory.
Still, what was this uneasy feeling?
"Hey, pick her up first. There should be somewhere to rest in this building, so let's ask the professor where we can lay her down."
Right. She was a patient, so we had to get her somewhere she could lie down.
I did as Reni said and carefully lifted the student, who reeked strongly of ammonia. She was light... and my hand was damp. Holding up her urine-soaked bottom felt a little unpleasant.
"You look a little rough, sure, but not enough to make someone faint. Never seen a coward quite like this."
I could only agree. Even if I had an ugly scar on my face, treating me like a monster seemed excessive. Karina, Reni, and Millia had never complained about my face. Objectively, I thought I looked somewhat frightening but not truly ugly.
Perhaps my feelings had shown on my face, because a hand landed on my shoulder. It was Reni, naturally. She patted my shoulder lightly and spoke.
"Don't be too sad. Of all the men I've met, you're the most dec...ent."
The way she stammered—was she embarrassed? I hadn't realized she was the shy type.
"...Thank you."
"Well... you know. That's all."
The hallway went quiet in an instant. All that remained was the sound of our shoes striking the floor. The awkward atmosphere between me and Reni didn't fade until we knocked on the laboratory door.
"Professor Lennon! We're here!"
"Come in!"
When Reni opened the door, the laboratory I'd visited about two weeks earlier appeared before us. It had not changed much, but a box placed in one corner commanded attention beneath the bright lights.
"I see we have one more guest today."
"Ah, yes. He's my successor now."
"Huh, a successor... How nice."
"Is there somewhere we can lay someone down...?"
At my words, Professor Lennon belatedly shifted his gaze to the student I was holding and let out a sigh. Judging by his reaction, he seemed to know her. Though it would be strange if people coming in and out of a building like this didn't know each other.
"Someone? Huh... Elisa? She collapsed again."
Again? This wasn't the first time she'd collapsed? I looked questioningly at Professor Lennon, and he gave me the explanation I wanted.
"She's my student. She's extremely timid and often faints. She was lucky this time. The last time, no one found her for nearly half a day, and she even caught the flu. Poor child."
Professor Lennon regarded Elisa in my arms with a complicated expression. It held a mixture of emotions I couldn't easily decipher. I had not met that many people, but the feelings in his gaze were clear enough to notice.
"Her room is at the end of the hallway on the right side of this lab. Take her there. And help her change her clothes, too..."
"Yohan, hand her over to me."
"I'll come with you."
I did not want her leaving me alone in this awkward situation. Reni ignored my desperate look and left the laboratory by herself.
"There's a chair over there. Have a seat."
"...Before that, is there somewhere I could wash my hands?"
"There should be a sink over that way."
I went straight to the sink and scrubbed my hands with cucumber-scented soap. The unpleasant feeling finally faded. Where was the chair?
Ah, that one?
I pulled a chair over and sat in a suitable spot. Professor Lennon had already turned his attention away from me, opened the box containing the cursed objects we'd brought, and resumed his work. He did not appear particularly curious about me. I folded my arms, leaned back, and stared blankly at the ceiling.
The Witch.
The Witch, huh.
The entrance ceremony, the Hellhound appearance incident, and the Demon Summoning episode.
What had the next episode been? I remembered many of them, but recalling the exact order was difficult. Including the main and side stories, the game took nearly eighty hours to finish. Naturally, it had a great many Main Quests.
I remembered the Demon Summoning episode so clearly because it had been especially memorable.
It was the episode containing the game's first true Bad Ending branch.
The Hellhound Incident had a Bad Ending, but its difficulty in the original game was close to a tutorial. Unless a player was a complete novice, triggering it was difficult. So many people cleared the episode that the X-team achievement completion rate approached seventy-eight percent.
The Demon Summoning episode, however, had only a fifty-percent clear rate—a sharp jump in difficulty from the previous episode.
Stronger monsters, annoying gimmicks, and even a time limit filled the episode with obstacles designed to make clearing it a nuisance.
That made it infamous as a newbie killer, but only by newbie standards. A veteran player like me remembered every detail of the episode... Uh... now that I thought about it, I barely remembered anything.
Following the broad strokes I did remember, traces of a strange ritual appeared around the academy, several students vanished, and a demon was ultimately summoned through one of them. “Witch” referred to the student possessed by that demon.
...Though the victim was so warped and deformed when encountered that, without the uniform, even their gender would have been difficult to determine.
The episode ended after the player controlled the protagonist and their companions to kill the “Witch,” with Karina mourning the victims. Its bitter, unsettling conclusion made it notoriously divisive.
Veteran players had once spent ages digging through the episode to uncover its hidden circumstances.
Even they had failed to discover the identity of the victim who became the Witch.
The information was so strangely absent that it seemed as though someone had deliberately erased it.
All they had uncovered was that the student who became the Witch had poor relationships with others and genuinely carried a witch's blood.
...But I was supposed to find that Witch first and become friends with them?
"...Now this is some grade-A bullshit."
Could it not at least throw me plenty of hints? Why did it want to turn my life from Hell difficulty into Blazing Inferno difficulty?
I had already suffered for ten years. Was that not enough?
Fuck my life...
"Excuse me."
"...Are you talking to me?"
"Who else is here besides you?"
"...I suppose so."
Why had he stopped working to speak to me? Had my muttering bothered him? I looked at Professor Lennon with the question written on my face as he wiped his glasses with a cloth and asked,
"Do you know anything about curses?"
"I don't."
"A curse is a mass of intense hatred. One can only cast a curse if they truly hate someone. Therefore, to use a curse, even the caster must swallow the curse known as hatred."
Hatred, huh.
Then again, anyone who was not obsessed to that degree probably wouldn't even consider placing a curse.
But why was he telling me this?
Maybe my face showed my doubt, because Professor Lennon kindly told me why he'd brought it up.
"It's something an Escort Knight ought to know. Though it's also just small talk to share while taking a rest."
That was a remarkably professor-like topic for small talk.
"Is that so."
"Returning to the subject... Because hatred fuels curses, they have been taboo since ancient times. Whenever curse-users appeared, people commonly cut off their heads on the spot. Those who practiced curses therefore retreated into the shadows. The leaders of the Church of Kalon wanted to eradicate curses from the world entirely, but failed time and again.
"They were as tenacious as weeds. As for how they managed to survive, the story went back several hundred years..."
Had he been more starved for conversation than I realized? Professor Lennon's lecture on curses continued without end. So much information was being crammed into my ears that staying conscious became difficult. At this rate, fighting the Hydra again might have been preferable.
Reni... please come back soon. This was a crisis. I couldn't even escape because I was alone!
In the end, the person who rescued me from the crisis was Reni, our tanned, brown-haired knight. She opened the door and stared at the professor and me in puzzlement.
"Professor. I'm back. But what's with that look on your face?"
"...I just have a headache from sitting through a lecture for the first time in ages."
"Ah..."
Reni nodded as if she understood exactly how I felt. Apparently she'd also endured the professor's sudden lectures. It probably wasn't something he did only to me.
"Has Elisa gotten better?"
"Weeell... she only fainted, so I cleaned her up a little and changed her clothes."
"Thank you. I'm a man, so situations like that leave me rather flustered..."
It was certainly awkward.
"...I'd like to see Saintess Karina soon."
"Understood. Follow me."
We followed Professor Lennon through a door in the corner of the laboratory. The faint medicinal smell suggested that the room served as an infirmary. After what felt like an eternity, I saw Karina lying on a bed against one wall.
Karina slept like the princess from Sleeping Beauty.
...When would she be able to wake up?
If Karina didn't wake up, everything would go off the rails.
"Saintess Karina..."
Before I knew it, Reni had taken Karina's hand and was carefully stroking the back of it.
"Most of the curse has been removed; only the core remains now. Since the core is lodged in her heart and can't be easily extracted, it's taking time... but I stake my honor on breaking the curse that's eating away at the Saintess."
Professor Lennon's voice came from behind.
It was the heaviest statement I'd heard all day.
My head was spinning, thoughts of the Witch and thoughts of Karina crashing together chaotically, so all I could do was nod.