Continuous Secret Meetings
Continuous Secret Meetings
<Darkest Academia>
A VR fantasy game set in an Arcanepunk world.
Vermel, Kim Seong-hyeon, was a veteran of veterans who had played that game for nearly ten years.
He didn't know how much time he had poured into it after falling for its world. When he came to his senses and looked back, it had already established itself as a part of his life.
The thrill of pushing through countless trials to reach the end of the main scenario was different every round. Every process was new, and the fact that a character's values, life, or death could change depending on his actions at each point was also captivating.
It had been updated frequently, too. He played each new DLC with satisfaction.
[DLC: Body of Steel, Human Heart]
That was, until that shitty DLC came along.
─ Did they make this expecting people to clear it?
While he was thinking about the past, he heard someone approaching in the distance. Vermel snapped out of his wave of reverie, quickly came to his senses, and rose from his seat.
The door opened with a creak.
The one who entered was a black-haired, golden-eyed girl. The sunset light that tried to squeeze in through the gap vanished without a trace when the girl closed the door.
Complete darkness settled in. Vermel quickly fed oil to the lantern he had prepared and lit it. The flame that began to flicker inside the glass lamp swept away the two people's shadows.
"...Sit over here."
Aether, who had given him a light nod, settled into a chair with a backrest.
The Elf race, said to be chosen by spirits, and the Gold-Eye Tribe, positioned as the complete magical and academic antithesis of those Elves.
Originally, a scene where the two races met like this did not exist in the game.
And so, he could finally understand.
That this world was not a game, and the strategies he had learned playing all this time might not hold perfectly true.
The major storylines would remain the same. The Demon King's resurrection, for one, was an immutable fact that could not be prevented even if one knew the future and prepared.
Yet the figures here sometimes acted outside his expectations and showed anomalous reactions. Professor Haspelt did so immediately, and so had this girl.
Aether kept her mouth shut for a while and looked around. The very moment she opened her mouth, the light inside the lantern wavered once.
"It's just the two of us, huh?"
─ So it's just the two of us left, huh?
Vermel reflexively flinched.
That was a line that had made him spit out vicious curses countless times while playing the final DLC.
It was one of Aether's fixed lines in the final chapter when you failed to prevent her Corruption. Vermel swept a hand down his chest and barely managed to calm his pulse.
Eyes holding the color of uranium rolled around in all directions. She seemed to be thinking about something as she scanned the ceiling and walls in turn. Vermel used that time to check the system window.
─ SYSTEM: The current probability of the world's destruction is 55 percent.
─ SYSTEM: There is currently no target feeling a specific emotion toward you.
Fortunately, there were no system problems.
"A Faraday cage...."
The girl, having finished her inspection of the surroundings, snorted softly. A hint of mischief seeped out from the twist of her lips. It was the expression she had shown him most frequently in the past month, second only to a blank face.
Vermel retraced what Aether had done while he was on his way back from receiving the commendation from the Chairman.
The question of whether there was a magic beast capable of seeing far away. To that question, he had answered, "There is."
It was time to elaborate on that answer, and to build trust at the same time.
"Rosemary."
"Yeah?"
"It's a way to block the eavesdropping of the Demon King's Fourth Corps Commander. If you reinforce all sides with iron plates like this, she can't use her Clairvoyance."
At that, Aether stuck her head forward and let out a small exclamation. She was interested.
However, there was still something to do before getting into the real discussion.
Vermel tore off a corner of his notebook, wrote his name on it, and handed it to her. It was a scrap of paper bearing his three-syllable real name. Aether took the crude business card, snorted, and began writing her own real name on the other side.
Aether presented it with both hands. Vermel accepted it with both hands as well.
Vermel, having read Aether's three-syllable real name, also raised the corners of his mouth.
There was no doubt.
This person was from the same place as him.
It had already been twenty years since he left a harsh review on a DLC and was dropped onto the Arens Continent by the Goddess's hand.
A lot had happened in that time.
At first, he had been glad to enter the world that served as the stage for his favorite game. It didn't feel real that he could face the characters he had only seen through VR and converse with them even more vividly.
Eventually, in Kaurelia, he built bonds with the Elves over a long time and came to pledge that he would protect this world from the Demon King. Certainly, until then, he had believed without a doubt that it would be doable since he had future knowledge.
But as time passed, he hit his limits in another sense: he could not fundamentally mix with the people of this place.
Because the civilizations they had lived in were different, the world was different, and their ways of thinking were different.
Originally, he had been human. Perhaps because of that, he couldn't fully accept the Elves' sense of time or cultural forms.
So much so that he thought living in Tillet was better in some ways. Even so, the humans of the Arens Continent and Earth's Homo sapiens were not completely the same species.
In the end, he couldn't completely erase his nostalgia for his days on Earth.
He was lonely because only he knew the future.
There was more than one coming catastrophe, and with no one to confide in, the frustration nearly drove him mad.
Aether was a fellow countryman he met in the midst of that. Even though she was a monster who had broken several of his VR devices in the DLC, that was just a surface layer she wore. In this world, he had figured out that her true nature was someone completely different.
Confidence surged, and at the same time, relief washed over him. Vermel closed the system window.
In the space where the translucent window had vanished, the black-haired, golden-eyed girl was watching him with relaxed eyes.
"Can I go first?"
They both knew.
That he, and Aether too, had a lot to say to each other.
If they were to open their hearts, they would have to stay up all night.
**
Finishing the semester didn't mean you immediately vacated the dormitory.
To accommodate students who had packed their things from the provinces, the academy gave a grace period of one week. During this time, the servants of noble families coming up from their main houses began to move about actively.
House Saliere was the same. Several servants from the Saliere family were occupying my room, packing up the luggage Rote would take with her.
The things I carried around were nothing more than toiletries and a few books. Since I had already established a foothold in the capital in the first place, there was no reason for me to leave.
Even so, we kept the club room open during this period. More precisely, it was locked, but I could pick it open and enter whenever I wanted. It was because Lorwell had lent me a spare key for my benefit, since I used it the most.
I began using it for secret meetings with the Possessor. Since it was vacation, no one came, and it was a good place in many ways for plotting.
When I slipped into the club room, avoiding the maids occupying my dorm room, Vermel and Frey were waiting.
"Hey!"
Why was she here?
"Aren't you packing?"
"I'm already done!"
"Then why are you here?"
"Because I'm bored!"
Then why didn't she go home? As I stared at her with a sullen expression, the little brat tilted her head up and answered a fact I hadn't even asked about.
"I decided I'm waiting until Rote finishes getting ready!"
"She said the two of them live in the same region. She's probably waiting because of that."
It was Vermel who supplied the supplementary explanation to my question.
"Huh? Did I say that to you...?"
"You said it last time while we were drinking."
"Aha!"
That probably wasn't the case. He just knew because Vermel had all of Frey's information memorized.
Vermel had begun helping me in this way, though because of that Rosemary or whoever, the scope of his help was limited outside the secret meeting room.
"Speaking of which, I heard Rote was calling you?"
"She's not trying to dump more work on me, is she?"
"If you're thinking of hitching a ride home, go help her out."
"Uwaaah."
Frey hopped down from a chair taller than she was and shuffled out of the club room, grumbling.
The door clunked shut. As usual, we entered the secret meeting room we had set up on one side of the club room.
"Let's continue the story we were on yesterday."
Vermel, having slumped into a chair, let out a deliberate sigh and pulled out a thick notebook.
One lantern, one notebook. Looking at it this way, it had a heavy interrogation-room atmosphere.
He scribbled with a quill, checked the ink's condition, and then spoke.
"So you came here before you were worked like a slave under Professor Kleis Haspelt, right?"
"Yeah, I was half dead from going through graduate school twice."
"...Was there nothing strange about her while you two lived together? Like being excessively obsessed with Flare, that sort of thing."
"I think I told you last time too. She was a person... a bitch crazy about Flare. Probably."
"That's because of you."
"I feel wronged."
Bringing that person up again after a long time automatically made my blood pressure rise.
I told him that I had been called to the Chairman and received an offer in a basement full of nobles to join their rebellion, and that I had learned from those people that Professor Haspelt was missing. At the moment, Vermel was in the middle of looking for a way to cleanly resolve that situation.
"The talk about Haspelt being kidnapped is probably true. There's a separate way to know if that person has died."
"So that's why Professor Herlein is heading out to the Northern Front. Should I stop her now?"
"Yeah. You absolutely have to stop her by finals. If nothing happens, Kleis will be alive until next year even if she was caught by magic beasts, but...."
Vermel paused to catch his breath. With a look that had become deeply serious, he continued.
"If Meri goes to the north now, she's going to die."