Chapter 26
Chapter 26
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Translator: uly
Chapter: 26
Chapter Title: The Incompetent Minister Wants to Retire
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One of the elite Intelligence Department agents, who had already restrained the mysterious man attempting a direct assault on the Minister, drew a sharp dagger and held it tentatively toward the shimmering barrier enveloping the Capital Academy.
The reinforced steel blade of the dagger began to sizzle and dissolved into nothingness the very moment it made contact with the translucent barrier.
The man, bound tightly and sprawled ignominiously on the hard ground, watched the scene unfold and burst into a fit of mad, jagged laughter.
"Kuh, kuhuhuhu! It is utterly useless! Completely and pointlessly useless! That barrier was constructed using the lethal venom of the legendary magical beast, the Hydra, as its core medium! The very instant anything touches its surface, it corrodes into oblivion! No soul can ever get inside... Gah?!"
A grim agent delivered a sharp kick to the madly laughing man’s stomach, then seized a handful of his hair and yanked his head upward with brutal force.
"What exactly have you done here?"
"Ha, haha. What did I do? You ask what I did? You are the ones who truly did this! This is my righteous revenge! For my family, my friends, and my entire village who were murdered by your Empire... Mmph?!"
Judging that no proper or logical explanation would be forthcoming from such a broken state, the agents silenced the rambling man and turned their attention toward the Minister, who stood in eerie silence staring at the barrier.
"We shall immediately request assistance from the Magic Tower. For your own safety, Minister, we strongly recommend you return to the Intelligence Department facilities first."
The Minister offered a slight nod at the agent's cautious words.
But he did not make any move to leave the scene.
Having confirmed every detail he needed through his observations, the Minister restored his normal field of vision and issued a sharp, clear order.
"Summon Angela Barrmut to this location. Tell her those were my direct words—she will understand the urgency."
"Yes, sir."
"In the meantime, I shall head inside and resolve this situation myself."
"I beg your pardon?"
Ignoring the agents who were clearly doubting their own ears, the Minister approached the corrosive barrier without showing even a hint of hesitation.
And without giving anyone present a chance to stop his advance, he took a confident step forward, passing straight through the lethal energy.
He did so effortlessly.
He moved with light, casual footsteps, as if he were merely out for a pleasant afternoon stroll.
"M-Minister!"
One agent belatedly tried to follow him in a panic but was immediately grabbed by the collar and held back by a colleague.
The agent who successfully restrained him before he could dissolve into mist kicked the ground, hurling several stone fragments at the shimmering barrier.
A violent hissing sound accompanied the fragments as they melted away into nothingness upon the slightest contact.
The barrier was undeniably intact and as lethal as ever.
"What in the world is happening..."
It wasn't just the Intelligence Department agents who were feeling an indescribable and heavy mix of awe and bewilderment.
The man who had actually created the poison barrier stood there, his mouth agape in shock, staring at the Minister's receding back.
The Minister continued to walk on silently, offering no word of explanation to those he left behind.
A faint, mysterious glimmer began to shine from the ring upon his finger.
The inner courtyard of the Capital Academy was currently a scene of silent terror.
Empire Crown Prince David Acherus cursed his own helplessness inwardly.
'Damn it all! It's no good—this restraint is not budging a single inch no matter what I try to do!'
A massive and intricate magic circle had been laid out to cover the entirety of the school grounds.
His body, ensnared by the powerful restraint spell it activated, felt as though it were wrapped in thick iron chains from head to toe.
David rolled his eyes with difficulty to survey his immediate surroundings.
Numerous students trapped in the exact same predicament filled his line of sight.
Their individual reactions to the crisis varied wildly.
Most were utterly terrified and sobbing in despair, but a few struggled desperately and futilely to survive.
Not that their frantic efforts yielded any tangible results.
'Our time is rapidly running out...!'
Morris Lupin, the mastermind behind this entire crisis, had stated before leaving that he lacked enough poison to do more than erect the barrier, but he had prepared a spectacular and grand death in its place—so we should look forward to it.
David had no idea why a respected, long-time instructor at the Capital Academy would suddenly turn to such villainy, nor did he have any way to find out right now.
What truly mattered was that a magic teacher revered by all had set up some catastrophic device to massacre the school's innocent students and faculty.
'Stay calm, David. You must think calmly and logically!'
He had deliberately raised the barrier to block all outside help and had restrained every soul trapped inside.
If he had rigged some kind of explosive or lethal device, it was surely set on a timer.
That much he could easily guess, but he could deduce nothing more than that.
Unable to move a single limb, he could not even begin to search for or attempt to disarm any such device.
'...Is this truly how it ends? Was I born into this royal world just to die in such a pathetic manner? ...Do not make me laugh!'
Ignoring the sensation of his skin tearing and the blood starting to flow, David gritted his teeth and poured every ounce of his strength into breaking free of the restraint spell.
Even at his young age, his firm resolve to overcome the fear of death and cling to hope was truly befitting of the Acherus Empire's Crown Prince—worthy of the highest praise.
But hope is not something you can simply grasp just by reaching out your hand for it.
'Damn it all...!'
Yet sometimes, hope has a way of walking right in through the door uninvited.
"Struggling any further will only cause your muscles to rupture, David."
David instinctively tried to turn his head at the sound of the familiar voice from behind him, but he could not move his neck, so he could only reel inwardly in massive shock as the man appeared before him.
"Erwin!? H-How did you manage to get in here...? N-No, that is not important right now—we need to disable the device immediately!"
"I am aware."
"What?"
Without even asking what the device was or where it might be hidden, the Minister turned and walked away with steady, purposeful steps.
"Erwin!"
David stared blankly after his retreating figure before belatedly calling out to him, but he was already gone from sight.
Time continued to pass.
The minutes and seconds flew by with an astonishing and terrifying speed.
It had been several long minutes since the Minister had vanished into the buildings.
A massive, earth-shaking explosion suddenly assaulted their eardrums.
"Ugh?!"
The deafening blast was so intense that David tried to cover his ears despite knowing it was an exercise in futility; the sound gradually faded into a ringing silence.
Another few minutes passed, and then the Minister reappeared before David as calmly as before.
"It turned out to be a dud."
Once I was back outside the academy grounds, I restored my normal vision again.
That was certainly a close call!
It was incredibly lucky that it turned out to be a dud, or the Capital Academy itself might have been obliterated in a total catastrophe.
Angela arrived on the scene soon after, dispelling the corrosive barrier over the school, and the spells restraining the students and professors finally unraveled.
Wow, but what are the actual odds of this? His Majesty the Emperor orders me to the school, and a terrorist attack hits right on time?
It seems that wild coincidences really do exist in this unpredictable world!
"Heh, hehehehehe..."
The man whom I had initially mistaken for the school security guard gazed up at the unscathed academy with a hollow, broken laugh.
I had only learned his real name a few moments ago: Morris Lupin.
He was a teacher at the Capital Academy, someone who was apparently quite respected by his students.
Come to think of it, he was ranting earlier about a village that had been murdered by the Empire.
Something in my memory clicked into place, and I posed a direct question to him.
"Are you by any chance a survivor of Montanus Village?"
Morris, laughing like a complete madman, slowly turned his head toward me.
"...Yes. I am the sole, remaining survivor of that beautiful village you lot trampled and ravaged."
Hm?
Trampled and ravaged, you say?
A beautiful village?
The incident happened long before I became the Minister, but I remembered flipping through old records out of pure boredom, and they painted a far different picture from Morris's ravings.
"Calling a village that fell into a dark cult and annihilated itself through mutual slaughter 'beautiful' raises some serious questions about your character."
Then again, this is the man who just tried to massacre his own students and colleagues, so perhaps it's not surprising.
"...A cult? Mutual slaughter? Ha! Do not you dare lie to me! I saw it with my own eyes that day—the knights were burning the corpses of the massacred villagers!"
Sure, he probably did see that specific scene.
The knights did indeed deploy to Montanus Village after the event, after all.
Admittedly, they were a bit late to the scene.
"Did you also personally see the knights slaughtering those villagers?"
"Of course I saw it!"
"Are you absolutely sure of what you saw? Were you not just told this version by some 'other person'?"
"...What do you mean?"
Aha. So that is exactly how it was.
Morris is now nearing his old age, but he must have been quite young when that tragedy occurred.
If he survived that horror, his parents or guardians probably hid him somewhere safe and out of sight.
Then, after the initial chaos ended, he saw the knights incinerating the villagers' corpses. That part lines up with the records.
"Wasn't it actually a priest named Goetz Umbalev from the Church of Retribution who told you 'the villagers were massacred by the knights'?"
Whether the title 'priest' truly fits the ringleader of such a group is highly debatable.
Morris's eyes widened in profound shock at my blunt words.
"H-How do you even know that name...!?"
How? I simply read the official records.
"Montanus Village was under surveillance long before the tragedy struck. After the cult group known as the Church of Retribution set up their base there, disappearances, murders, and arsons never once stopped."
The damage even began to spread to the neighboring villages.
The knights investigated the claims, of course, but the rural village's insular nature, amplified by their religion, yielded no evidence—per the records.
"The Church of Retribution preaches that everyone in this world is a sinner who has betrayed the Goddess. They start by inducing repentance, but it always ends in mutual massacres of the unfaithful."
Once they have killed off all the believers in their target area, they simply move on and repeat the process elsewhere.
They are thoroughly vile in every possible sense.
"...So you are saying that what happened that day was the villagers slaughtering each other...?"
"You have finally got it right. For the record, you actually weren't the only survivor back then."
The others were all executed for their crimes long ago, so in terms of living survivors to this day, Morris wasn't technically wrong.
Incidentally, those who barely escaped the tragedy could not accept that their own loved ones had killed each other and they all went insane.
Right up until their deaths, they repeated the same mantra, 'The Empire murdered our village!'
They chose to distort their reality rather than face the painful truth of their own actions.
That's why his earlier outburst immediately brought the case of Montanus Village to my mind.
"Lies... It is all nothing but lies... Y-You lot covered it up and falsified everything!"
"Are you an idiot? If we had covered it up, the Intelligence Department exists specifically to record that 'it was covered up.' If we had falsified it, we would record that 'it was falsified.'"
Otherwise, even we would get confused about the truth later on.
"Such a thing..."
The man, whose entire life of misguided revenge had been exploited by true evildoers, was promptly handed over to the knights.
He would spend his remaining days in a state of bitter regret.
Whether that is fortunate or unfortunate given how little time he has left, I wouldn't know.
Speaking of which, what about the order His Majesty gave me?
Given the chaotic situation, casually approaching the princess and asking if she has a boyfriend feels a bit awkward.
As I was pondering my next move, someone suddenly rushed forward and into my arms.
"Oppa! Are you alright!?"
"I am fine. Now please let go of me."
You are far too old to be hugging me like this on the roadside. It is quite embarrassing.
"That is so mean of you!"
"As a separate issue, thank you for coming so quickly. It made handling this entire situation much smoother."
"...Smoother, huh."
Ah, whatever. It seems like today is a total wash, so I will just go grab a meal with Angela.
His Majesty should understand the delay once I explain the situation. If not, and he forces me to resign, that is perfectly fine too.
I had only planned to lightly greet David and Ellis out of simple courtesy before heading to the palace—but instead,
"Erwin Barrmut. I hereby bestow upon you the grand title of [Acherus Overlord]."
I ended up receiving a privilege that lets me do pretty much anything I want except for rebellion or crimes against His Majesty and the imperial family—it seems totally useless to me.