Chapter 94
Chapter 94
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Translator: Vine
Chapter: 94
Chapter Title: The Saintess
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The topic I gave the students for their group project was monsters.
In teams of four, they were to divide roles and research a monster. Their choice of monster was up to them.
They had to investigate its habitat, weaknesses, attack methods, and even its reproductive habits.
However, I excluded common monsters like goblins and slimes.
As if I'd let them take the easy way out.
Still, I gave them a generous amount of time. The deadline was the day before the Grand Festival.
If they finished early, I'd have to teach another class, after all.
'It'd be nice if a team found information on another S-rank monster.'
I planned on hunting an S-rank monster later, but aside from the Volcanic Horned Dragon, no information about any other S-rank was ever mentioned before the end of the original story.
Since it had to be done eventually, I hoped someone would do the heavy lifting for me.
I announced the group project to all the classes, not just Class A, with a day's interval between each, so there was nothing for me to do no matter which class I entered.
But now that I’ve tried it, I understand why professors assign group projects.
It’s basically the same as offloading the task of collecting necessary information onto the students. And if you don't feel like teaching, you can just fill the time with a group project.
From a student's perspective, they'd probably want to pluck out every last strand of their professor's thinning hair, but among the first-years, there wasn't a single student who would dare challenge me.
I was the one who had crushed the professor they so admired, and I was the one who had shattered the arrogance of Class A.
Who would dare defy me now? Naturally, they had to do as I said.
And so, my job was to slack off while getting paid, occasionally giving vague answers to the students' questions.
At the end, all I had to do was listen to their presentations and rank them.
"Ugh..."
Thanks to this, the classrooms I entered were filled with groans from all corners.
Group projects in this world had clear pros and cons.
The advantage was that no one could just scrape together information from places like Knowledge iN or Namu Wiki. The disadvantage, as just mentioned, was that the lack of internet made research incredibly difficult.
The only way to find information was through books.
And if even that failed, they would have to go to the Adventurer's Guild—a place they so despised—and interview an adventurer who had actually hunted that monster.
That's why the students groaning right now weren't the ones who couldn't decide on a monster to research, but the ones who had chosen one, only to find so little information that their investigation was hitting a wall.
Naturally, for a group project, overlapping presentation topics was a bad idea, which meant the teams that had quickly claimed monsters with abundant information had the advantage.
Using the groans that echoed every hour as my lullaby, I pulled out a pillow, rested my head, and closed my eyes.
***
As we were heading back to our dorms after class, we saw a long line of students in the garden.
It wasn't the first time I'd seen students gather, but they usually crowded around in a circle to watch a fight, not form a long, orderly queue like at a fan signing.
I can say that with certainty, as someone with experience being a monkey in a cage.
So, what was this line for?
Curiosity stopped me in my tracks. Naturally, Luna and Yui stopped as well.
"Luna. Did the academic schedule say anything about an idol holding a fan signing today?"
"...I do not know what an 'idol' is, but there was nothing of the sort scheduled for today."
"Yui, you... never mind."
"Yes?"
There was no way Yui would know about something like that. I shouldn't waste my breath asking.
"Sir Luke, just in case, is this another kind of event?"
Luna asked cautiously, wondering if this, too, was a sign of something to come.
But there was no way something this trivial could be an event.
If it were, all the students standing in line would have to be brainwashed.
"Beats me."
And the problem was, I didn't know what it was either.
It could be an event that was happening out of its original timeline, like the mirror event, or perhaps a new event that didn't exist in the original story, born from the butterfly effect.
Like the hanged Arthur that Toilet claimed to have seen.
"But, Mr. Luke. Don't you think there are a lot of men here?"
At Yui's words, I scanned the line again. I hadn't noticed at a glance, but she was right; there were definitely more men than women.
Another commonality was that most of them were injured students who hadn't fully recovered yet, and for some reason, every single one of them had a dopey grin plastered on their face.
"If we don't know, we can just go see."
There was a simple way to find out the reason for this line.
All I had to do was go to the front and see who was there.
I walked toward the head of the line.
"You are all finished."
On my way, I heard the beautiful voice of the person who seemed to be the cause of this line, but I couldn't identify them by voice alone.
Novels are made of text, not sound.
The only thing I could be sure of was that it was a woman.
At the end of the line I reached, a woman was sitting in a chair against a backdrop of colorful flowers.
The woman, with her white hair and white eyes, appeared to be healing the man sitting across from her.
The moment I saw her, my face contorted in disgust.
"Ugh, for fuck's sake."
"What's wrong all of a sudden?"
"What is *she* doing here?"
"Is she someone you know?"
Someone I know?
"Of course I do."
I had been uncertain myself until she used her magic just now.
Sub-heroines have little screen time, so they naturally fade from a reader's memory quickly.
But I recognized her the moment I saw the magic she used to heal the male student in front of her.
The only person in this world, aside from Arthur, who could use light magic.
The Saintess.
That was the nickname of the girl who was originally supposed to make her first appearance at the Grand Festival.
A truly fantasy-esque nickname, don't you think?
In my past life, spouting words like "Saintess" or "Hero" would get you labeled a weeb with a hero complex. Such terms were only acceptable in a fantasy world.
She wasn't called a Saintess because she was actually chosen by a goddess. It was just something people made up.
Her kind personality, beautiful appearance, and her light magic combined led people to call her a Saintess as a metaphor.
In conclusion, she wasn't a genuine, chosen-by-the-goddess Saintess, but a hollow one whose title stemmed from her looks and personality.
As proof, she wasn't wearing a nun's habit like saintesses in fantasy stories often do, but regular clothes. Considering she belonged to Zwey Academy, I guessed it was their student uniform.
You could consider the Saintess a sub-heroine, just like the Student Council President.
Not a main character, but not entirely insignificant either.
As if reciting from a book, I explained who she was to Luna and Yui.
"The protagonist of a novel... seems to have quite the luck with women."
"That's what gets people to read."
People are crazy about harems. More accurately, men are.
This proved that the novel's readership was predominantly male, and in truth, I used to enjoy harems myself.
"But Sir Luke, didn't you just make a face like you'd seen something you shouldn't have?"
As Luna said, I fucking hated that Saintess.
"From what you've said, she sounds like a very good person. Why?"
"Luna, you still don't get it after all this? Being nice gets you nowhere."
True to her nickname, she treated everyone equally regardless of their status, could not stand injustice, and had a personality that drove her to help anyone in need.
She wasn't some degenerate "drug-addict Saintess" or "perverted Saintess" you see in modern novels, but a true Saintess, embodying all the classic fantasy tropes.
So why did I hate such a pretty, busty, and kind person?
I hated her for being uselessly kind.
She was so kind that she tried to help with everything, but when that well-intentioned help went beyond her capabilities, we decided to call it meddling.
And wasn't that why someone who shouldn't even be here had ditched her own academy's classes to come all this way and heal students from another academy?
For the record, I hated that Saintess second only to Arthur.
The reason Arthur came first was simple. As the protagonist, he obviously appeared more often than the Saintess.
If the Saintess had appeared more than Arthur, she would have beaten him for the number one spot on my shit list.
In a word.
"A female Arthur."
"...Is it that bad?"
"Wow..."
They each had their own reaction.
Though just from the nickname, they seemed to grasp that it wasn't a good thing.
"Want me to list off a few of her great deeds from the novel?"
Dragging things out with a captured Demonic Human, wondering if they could be redeemed, only to get stabbed in the back; rushing to the front lines during a battle to heal someone, only to get injured and become a burden; and when faced with danger, instead of trying to escape, she would just sit down and start praying, believing a god would save her.
As I recounted her achievements one by one, Luna and Yui shook their heads.
"That's... more serious than I thought."
"Don't you think the nickname Mr. Luke gave her is more fitting?"
"Right?"
Now that I'd said it all out loud, it did sound pretty bad. Maybe this was why everyone wrote tuned-up saintesses instead of pure ones these days.
Just then, Toilet sat down in the chair across from the Saintess.
The bruises from my beating yesterday were still visible, and it seemed he planned to use them as an excuse to get healed.
"Toilet and the female Arthur meeting... "
It was a truly magnificent sight.
What kind of overpowered lineup was this?
The source of all my frustration and the factory that mass-produces it had just met. The sight alone was so suffocating that I subconsciously pounded my chest with my fist.
"Hoo... Luna, why don't you go get treated too?"
"I'd rather not get involved with her..."
Having learned the truth behind the hollow title of "Saintess," Luna seemed reluctant to get involved.
But she came here to volunteer for free. Shouldn't we exploit her down to the marrow?
She was doing this because she wanted to, so we were fully entitled to take advantage.
While we were talking, the Saintess was healing Toilet, a light emanating from her hands.
I overheard their conversation, and it was quite the spectacle.
"A demon appeared, and with a single strike of my sword, I took it down!"
"You must have gone through so much. I'm sure your fellow students are very grateful to you, Sir Arthur."
"Hehe... It was really tough."
He was needlessly exaggerating, and the sight of the Saintess responding to his every word with such seriousness was truly comical.
"Look at that dopey grin on Toilet's face. How disgusting."
At my words, the students in line turned their gazes toward me.
Not only them, but the Saintess and Toilet as well.
Toilet's eyes widened when he saw me, and he quickly changed his tune, pointing a finger at me.
"Saintess! It's him! He's the one who did this to me!"
Toilet seized the opportunity, using the Saintess's personality to his advantage.
Her inability to turn a blind eye to injustice.
He was ratting me out as the one who had mercilessly beaten him into his current state.
She immediately rose from her chair, walked over to me, and bowed politely.
I suppose she did so because I was in my professor's attire. Then, she saw Luna standing next to me, wrapped in bandages, and her eyes grew as wide as lanterns.
She looked back and forth between me and Luna.
'I didn't do that, you crazy bitch.'
At this point, a whole story must have formed in the Saintess's mind.
Something about me abusing Luna and not even getting her treated.
And then, she immediately went into lecture mode.
"Professor. Violence is not the answer. Sometimes, parents or teachers resort to violence for the sake of discipline, but violence can never be justified under any circumstances—"
And so, with a bored expression, I slapped her across the cheek.
-Smack!
"Kyah!"