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Translated By Arcane Translations
Translator: Wjin
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“Did Freya… die happily?”
The question didn’t make sense easily.
“What do you mean?”
“No need to hide it. The proposal Freya made to you was clear.”
A proposal?
Was he talking about the proposal I knew?
Again, I wasn’t sure.
“Didn’t she ask you to kill her?”
He was right.
How on earth did he know that?
I wasn’t sure, but I was certain he was mistaken about something.
“Yes, she did make such a proposal.”
“Indeed, then she was happy…”
“But I didn’t kill her.”
His eyes widened.
“You didn’t kill her? Didn’t she tell you? That she was the Demon King?”
She did tell me that.
No, she lied.
But I wasn’t fooled.
“Well, she is the Demon King…”
But could I really tell this to Sigrit?
Of course, I wasn’t revealing that she was the Demon King, but rather that she wasn’t.
However…
“She’s not the Demon King? Do you believe that too?”
Now it was my turn to be surprised.
Although the optical modulation wouldn’t reveal my expression.
“Professor, do you believe she’s not the Demon King?”
“There’s no proof. It might even be a foolish belief. But at least I believe so.”
At this point, I started to wonder about the relationship between Sigrit and Freya.
He knew Freya’s identity as the Demon King, and that she wanted to die. Furthermore, he even believed she wasn’t the Demon King.
Then, their relationship probably wasn’t just that of simple colleagues.
“Sigrit, what is your relationship with Freya?”
“My relationship with Freya…”
He fell into thought for a moment.
And then he finally opened his mouth.
“To me, Freya is a benefactor, a teacher, and a colleague. I can tell you since you already know about Freya’s identity. Explaining it might be a long story. Is that alright with you?”
Of course. I had to hear it.
I hadn’t expected there to be someone nearby who knew Freya’s past.
Perhaps I could get a hint about Freya’s task from his story.
“I want to hear it.”
Then he began his story, as if reminiscing about the past.
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I met her because of the reckless adventurous spirit I had as a child.
There were many urban legends in the underground passages of the Holy City of Hailen.
I used to roam the underground passages every day, regardless of whether I got scolded by the adults.
Of course, most of the urban legends were fake, made up by someone. But some of them were real.
One of them was the rumor about the underground witch, and eventually, I succeeded in meeting her while exploring the underground passages.
If I hadn’t met her then, I would have surely died. The place where she was imprisoned was deep underground.
I missed my footing in a crevice and fell down there, severely injuring my leg.
She used string and a stick to stop the bleeding and splint my leg. It was basic first aid, but it saved my life.
And I ate the preserved food that was there and waited for the watchman who came once a month.
One day, while living with her, she asked me about my life’s goal. But I was young then, and I didn’t really have a goal. So I answered vaguely.
I said I wanted to become a hero.
Then she asked me if I wanted to learn swordsmanship.
I didn’t take the suggestion very seriously, but since I didn’t know when the watchman would come and I was bored, I decided to accept.
Holding a shabby stick, limping on one leg, I learned swordsmanship from her.
At that time, I didn’t know how excellent the swordsmanship was.
I just learned swordsmanship as if playing with her, to pass the time.
Time passed, and the day the watchman was supposed to come approached.
That day, too, I learned swordsmanship from her and lay down to sleep, when she said to me,
Could I kill her?
When I asked why she was asking such a thing, she replied that she had no purpose in life.
She had lived for too long in that state, and she didn’t want to live anymore.
Naturally, those weren’t words a kid who hadn’t lived long could understand.
I was scared. The kind woman who had treated my leg and taught me swordsmanship asked me to kill her.
So I desperately pretended to be asleep.
Then I really fell asleep, and when I was awakened by the watchman the next day, she was gone.
I couldn’t see her after that.
But I didn’t forget the swordsmanship she taught me, and based on that surprisingly strong swordsmanship, I entered the Hero Academy and became a hero.
And around that time, I stopped vaguely remembering her from my childhood.
After becoming a hero, it was a continuous hardship. Because of that damn hero ranking.
I caught Chaos Beasts and caught them again, trying to climb to a higher rank.
The rank I could raise by just catching one Demon King, a mediocre person like me with nothing but swordsmanship, had to raise it by catching hundreds of Chaos Beasts.
Eventually, I was able to reach the vicinity of a high-ranking hero solely through the sheer number of Chaos Beast subjugations, but that was the limit.
I had already reached retirement age as a hero.
What came to me, having failed to become a high-ranking hero and facing retirement, was… an offer to become a professor at the Hero Academy.
At first, I didn’t really want to do it.
I wasn’t a high-ranking hero, and I was just mediocre, so I wondered if the talented students of the Hero Academy would respect me.
My worries ended when I visited the Hero Academy. Because there I met her, who had started working as a professor a little earlier than me.
It had been a long time since I had met her, but I recognized her at a glance.
Her appearance hadn’t changed at all from my memory. But the reunion was short-lived, as I realized her true identity.
It must have been a long time ago that I saw her, but she hadn’t aged at all. There was only one such being.
The Demon King.
I wanted to deny the fact, but she recognized me too, came up to me, and said she wanted to hear my answer from back then.
As you might have guessed, she told me she was the Demon King.
Honestly, I thought about it for a moment.
If I killed her, I could finally have my name listed among the high-ranking heroes. But I didn’t want to kill her.
I had forgotten it for a while, but the memories of her treating my leg and teaching me swordsmanship were too warm.
In the end, I decided to deny that she was the Demon King.
That she couldn’t be the Demon King. That even if she was the Demon King, there must be something different about her compared to other Demon Kings.
So I postponed her proposal again. I decided to watch with hope.
And that thought seemed okay at first.
Being a professor at the Hero Academy was the job she stubbornly chose after her confinement by the Church ended, and she actually seemed happy back then.
Come to think of it, she was smiling back then when she was teaching me. I thought maybe she could become an ordinary professor.
But that shattered when he became her student. She asked him to kill her too.
But he refused for some reason, and now, having reached rank 2 in the hero rankings… he’s become like that.
Was it the influence of the student she raised changing his mind as soon as he reached rank 2 in the hero rankings?
She gradually lost her motivation as a professor.
I couldn’t properly judge whether that was good or bad.
It was painful to see her not looking as happy as before, but at the same time, she stopped making such proposals to the candidates.
But what was certain was that it couldn’t last forever. As time went by, I could see her reaching her limit.
It was as if she was returning to the haggard appearance she had when I first encountered her underground.
But recently, her eyes regained some life for a while.
For a while, I thought it was because of Candidate Elsie, but I realized it wasn’t during the last mock battle.
To think that Allen Blake would enter the school hiding his identity. Then there was only one conclusion I could draw.
“That she would ask you to kill her too.”
“So you assumed I would have killed her?”
The story was quite long, as he had said.
But it was certainly helpful.
His story gave me more to think about than I expected.
‘He may not have noticed, but there are many strange parts.’
Why did she choose to work as a professor after the Church’s confinement was lifted? Surely there were more flexible jobs if she was going to work as a double agent.
Why is it that the targets she is obsessed with asking to kill her are limited to her ‘students’?
If she wants to die, there are heroes, and although it’s not a good method, there’s suicide.
However, the targets she asked to kill her were all her students.
After hearing his story, I thought about those questions for a while. And finally, I arrived at what I needed to do right now.
My head, which had been dizzy from the hangover, cleared up as if there had been no hangover. It felt like the puzzle pieces had finally fallen into place.
“Thank you. Thanks to you, I think I have a sense of her task.”
“Task?”
“Yes, I told her to do a task first if she really wanted to die.”
The questions weren’t completely resolved.
It was a problem I could never solve on my own in the first place.
All that’s left is to guide her to solve the task.
“But let me tell you one thing, she’s not the Demon King. I can be sure of that.”
Leaving Sigrit, who started to have a slightly warmer expression after hearing my confident words, I left his office.
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“Freya! Are you in there?”
I knocked on Freya’s office door.
Then I heard a small sound from inside the office.
“What is it?”
“I have something to say regarding the task.”
“…Come in.”
When I opened the office door and went in, Freya was sprawled on the sofa as if exhausted.
It seemed she still hadn’t recovered from the hangover.
I felt sorry for her, but I didn’t want to hesitate.
“Freya, you said you learned swordsmanship from Mr. Libero, right?”
“I did. I can’t replicate his swordsmanship, but the foundation of my swordsmanship is mostly based on his teachings.”
“Would you teach me that swordsmanship?”
The memories of the second trial evaporated like a dream, and most of the memories of Libero’s swordsmanship that remained were mostly sensory.
Thanks to gaining ‘enlightenment,’ I could imitate his swordsmanship to some extent, but I couldn’t fill the theoretical gaps.
So I tried to save Libero somehow. And when he died, I had a feeling I wouldn’t be able to learn his swordsmanship anymore.
But that intuition was wrong.
“Freya, please.”
There was one person left who still remembered his swordsmanship intact.
“Do… we really have to do this now? And like I said, I can’t replicate Libero’s swordsmanship.”
I know that.
At this point, I’m the only one who can even imitate Libero’s swordsmanship, since I’ve undergone training beyond Libero’s.
But what I needed now wasn’t replication.
“Even just the theory is fine. Please teach me Mr. Libero’s swordsmanship.”
“So, do we really have to…”
“Tomorrow, next week, anytime is fine. Just teach me.”
And I uttered the key words that would elicit her task.
“Please. Master.”
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