Chapter 131
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Translator: Ryuma
Chapter: 131
Chapter Title: The Faker Voice
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One of the cadets shouted, his face drained of all color.
“……”
“We heard a voice pleading for help... begging to be saved, so we rushed in... but it was...”
“Leon... Leon... my son... where on earth are you...”
Seduced by the voice calling out to me just like that, I trudged over to it step by step.
“I-Instructor, no!”
“It's dangerous to get close! Even Her Highness the Princess because of that thing...”
The panicked cadets grabbed at my arms and legs, screaming in complete terror.
“That thing... that thing!!”
“Damn it! How does this guy have so much strength?!”
Shock spread across the faces of the cadets as they clung to me but were dragged along anyway.
I finally reached the area behind the massive tree where the voice had come from.
“Eek?!”
At the same time, the cadets who saw something collapsed to the ground, faces pale as ghosts.
What caught my eye first were blood-red, eerie eyes and a mouth stretched open to a horrifying degree.
Its gaping maw was crammed full of teeth that sent chills down the spine just to look at.
Even stranger was that its face was human-like, but every other part of its body was covered in stark white fur.
From a distance, it looked like some grotesque figure with its head propped up by long white hair.
At a glance, it resembled something out of a ghost movie from my past life—eerie and spine-tingling.
I'd been so startled the first time I saw one of those.
[Entity: Faker Voice confirmed.]
Yeah, I know. Jang-san-beom bastard. This thing's pulling the same crap from Labyrinthos right here.
Back then, it was pitifully calling me “Big Brother.”
Sure enough, spotting me, the Faker Voice tilted its head and grinned.
“Hiiiaaak!!”
Ignoring the cadets' terrified screams, I approached it as if entranced.
“Damn it! It's already charmed, just like Her Highness the Princess!”
“Run!!”
The stark white, long fur began to coil around my entire body like it wanted to ensnare me.
At that exact moment, as its mouth gaped even wider to swallow me whole—
“You fucking bastard, imitating whose voice right now?”
In an instant, I shot out my hand, seized the Faker Voice by the head, and smashed it straight into the tree.
Kwaaaang!!!!!!
-Kiririk...
“Have you lost your mind?”
Bam!!!
“Who the hell do you think you are?”
Bam!
“You little shit.”
Bam!!!
“Imitating my mother?”
Kwaaaang!!!
With tremendous roars, I slammed its head into the tree several more times.
Bam!! Bam!! Bam!!
The white fur tightened fiercely around me as if trying to stop me, but it couldn't halt my movements.
Each smash unleashed a massive shockwave.
And the cadets watched my actions in stunned silence.
The cadets were completely frozen, just staring at the scene unfolding before them.
“……”
The object of their terror—the monster radiating such malevolent aura that just looking at it felt like it would drive them insane—was being bashed into the old tree, letting out agonized shrieks.
How the hell was that even possible?
No attack had worked on it before, that much was certain.
In truth, to these cadets here, Leon was something of an annoying figure.
He was someone Professor Rommel had brought in from outside, and ultimately, he'd interfered with their exam.
He'd stubbornly blocked them from going deeper, and it wasn't even an academy directive, so some wondered if he was obstructing them for some cheating scheme of his own.
They held back from complaining further thanks to Princess Eirena's persuasion, but that didn't mean their team's resentment had faded.
Once Leon was gone, it was only natural they'd vent all their frustrations.
“Who the hell does he think he is, telling us to go or stay?!”
“Does that even make sense? That's way overstepping!”
Even as she listened to her team's complaints with her eyes closed in thought, Princess Eirena slowly calmed them down.
“He doesn't strike me as the type to do something like that just to obstruct us.”
“Your Highness.”
“Let's find another way. If we switch routes now and move quickly...”
She was just about to persuade her team when—
From far off, beyond the forest where Leon had warned them not to enter, came a pained cry for help.
-Heeelp... heeelp... someone... please help...
The voice sounded on the verge of death, sending chills through Princess Eirena and the rest of Team 1.
The source was in the direction of the woods Leon had explicitly told them to avoid.
But a plea for help coming from there?
A hypothesis quickly formed in their minds.
The instructor named Leon had harmed someone inside and was telling them not to enter to cover it up.
“Did you hear that just now?”
“Yes, we did.”
The moment her team nodded, Princess Eirena shot to her feet with a frosty expression and grabbed her sword.
“Everyone! We move in fast!”
There was no need to deliberate. None of them were heartless enough to ignore a dying person's plea.
If only they hadn't.
They ended up ignoring Leon's warning and venturing inside anyway.
And there, they witnessed it.
A monster with a stark white, horrific appearance mimicking a dying human's voice.
When they came face-to-face with it casually hiding behind a tree and imitating a human on the brink of death, the cadets felt an indescribable chill and grotesqueness.
Even someone with nerves of steel would feel their heart drop; for green cadets like them, it was beyond words.
“That's how it happened...”
“No need to ask what came next.”
“……”
The cadets fell silent, heads bowed, their hands trembling faintly.
Their gazes shifted to my hand.
It was covered in what seemed to be the Faker Voice's blood—a thick red liquid.
In short, the Faker Voice had been beaten into a pulp.
But it wasn't dead.
These things were notoriously hard to kill in the first place.
The one I'd pummeled until it was mush in my grip had scattered like a clump of white fur, distancing itself from me.
It's probably biding its time for an opening right now.
To the cadets, the monster's mere existence had apparently instilled enough fear to become a trauma.
“So, what happened to Her Highness?”
“Well... unlike us, the moment she encountered that monster, she suddenly hung her head...”
“And headed deeper into the forest?”
“……”
After a silence, one of them cautiously spoke up.
“Um... is that monster dead, though?”
They were trying hard to overcome their fear.
“No, it's still alive.”
“What the hell even is that thing? I've never seen or heard of anything like it...”
“Faker Voice. It mimics the voice of someone it's eaten, or reads the memories of someone it's looking at and imitates one of their connections.”
That's why it had been casually mimicking a human voice while hiding.
“No way... I've never even heard of a monster like that...”
“It's not something you see easily to begin with. Once it marks prey, it never lets them go.”
At those words, the cadets' faces turned ashen. They'd been marked as its prey from the start, after all.
“Th-then what do we do?! With it escaped, there's no guarantee it won't come after us again...”
“Wh-what about Her Highness?! What happened to the Princess...?”
“She's charmed. She probably walked right into its lair on her own. If it hadn't been her, your whole team would've wandered in there in a daze.”
Her strong mental fortitude had absorbed the brunt of the effect, leaving the rest unscathed. Realizing that, their faces grew somber.
No one spoke.
They'd realized that none of this would've happened if they hadn't ignored my warning and entered a dangerous zone.
“Looks like you've got the picture. You lot pull out immediately.”
“B-but Her Highness...”
“I'll get the Princess out. Now get going.”
I summoned the spectral horses, and they freaked out at first but quickly mounted up after I explained.
“Keep this in mind, all of you.”
“……”
“The Demon Realm is like this. When it's called dangerous, there's always a reason.”
“Yes...”
I sent them off on the spectral horses, their nods weak and listless.
The area was crawling with undead created by the Faker Voice, but the spectral horses were too nimble and fluid for the undead to catch.
Plus, Muyoung and the other wraiths were clearing paths through the forest everywhere.
Now all that was left was Eirena Lu Pascalia.
Just the one princess, fully enthralled by the Faker Voice's mimicry.
No need to ask why she'd acted like that.
She was charmed. Unbeknownst to herself, she'd lost her mind and was racing madly toward the Faker Voice's lair.
Her mind felt hazy.
In this foggy haze, as if someone were dragging her along or calling to her, Eirena slowly opened her eyes.
The pitch-black surroundings weren't just the darkness of the black forest.
It was an impenetrable void where she couldn't even distinguish front from back, left from right.
As chilly air brushed over her entire body, she felt a strange, thread-like sensation on her hands and feet.
A shiver of dread shot through her whole body!
“Kyaaak!? Wh-what the hell is this?!”
Only then did she realize her arms and legs were tightly bound by something like a bundle of threads.
She desperately tried to summon her aura to resist, but the threads wouldn't snap—instead, they tightened even more, writhing like living things.
And soon, eerie red eyes began to emerge from the darkness.
Terrifying fear enveloped her entire body.
But something felt off.
It had been grotesque before she lost consciousness, but now it looked even more twisted, to put it bluntly.
The thing staggered toward her like a beast in agony from grievous wounds, its bloodshot eyes plunging her into terror.
Then, a reddish glow spread around, parting the blackness slightly.
At the same time, a completely different, hellish nightmare of a scene burned itself into her mind.
Monsters? Animals? What in the world was this place?
Born into nobility, she'd rarely ever plunged into such terror.
She'd felt fear sparring at the academy or fighting monsters for the first time, but it was always something she could endure.
But this was entirely different.
An extreme terror she'd never experienced in her life.
Beyond the fear of death, a cold, dark horror that stimulated her primal instincts consumed her whole being.
She'd always prided herself on her emotional composure.
Even when a family member in the imperial house died, or when she heard that Prince Dorn—who'd been kind to her as a child—had passed away recently amid the chaos.
She'd felt sorrow, but hadn't shown it openly.
Yet since entering this exam, that threshold had been shattered twice already.
First, uncharacteristically screaming cutely and collapsing upon meeting Leon, and now this situation.
But.
This time, it had far surpassed even her stoic limits.