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Translated By Arcane Translations
Translator: FusionX
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“Hey Renny, do you know who this is?”
“I’m not sure either. It’s my first time seeing her too.”
Was she a student who somehow ended up here?
I looked down at the fainted female student.
Purple hair. Pale skin. Small build.
She definitely wasn’t a heroine.
There was no purple-haired heroine in my memory.
Though I might have simply forgotten… but for now, I didn’t remember.
Based on my experience so far, I usually recalled things when I heard names or saw faces.
But what was this uneasy feeling?
“Hey, carry her for now. There must be a place to rest in this building, so let’s ask the professor if there’s somewhere we can lay her down.”
Right.
We should lay her down since she’s a patient.
Following Renny’s words, I carefully lifted the student who was strongly emanating an ammonia smell.
She was light… and my hands felt damp.
It felt a bit unpleasant to be supporting her bottom, wet with urine.
“Though you look a bit fierce, it’s not enough to make someone faint… What a scaredy-cat.”
I couldn’t help but agree.
Even if I had some unsightly scars on my face, wasn’t it too much to treat me like a monster?
Neither Karina, Renny, nor Millia had said anything about my face.
Objectively, I thought that while I might look a bit scary, my face wasn’t terribly ugly.
Perhaps I had shown some emotion on my face, as a hand was placed on my shoulder.
Of course, it was Renny.
She patted my shoulder and said,
“Don’t be too sad. Among the men I’ve met, you’re the be…st.”
Judging by her stammering, was she embarrassed?
I didn’t know she was so shy.
“…Thanks.”
“No, well. That’s how it is.”
The corridor suddenly became quiet.
All that remained was the sound of our shoes tapping on the floor.
The awkward atmosphere created by Renny and me didn’t dissipate until we knocked on the laboratory door.
“Professor Lennon! We’re here!”
“Come in!”
As Renny opened the door, the laboratory I had seen once about two weeks ago came into view.
There didn’t seem to be any major changes from then, but a box placed in one corner of the lab revealed its undeniable presence under the bright lights.
“We have an extra guest today, I see.”
“Ah, yes. He’s my new junior now.”
“Oh, a junior… Good times.”
“Is there anywhere we can lay someone down…?”
At my words, Professor Lennon belatedly shifted his gaze to the female student in my arms and let out a sigh.
Judging by his reaction, it seemed he knew her.
It didn’t seem likely that people who frequented this building wouldn’t know each other.
“A person? Hm… Elisa? She collapsed again, I see.”
Again?
It wasn’t the first time she had collapsed?
When I looked at Professor Lennon questioningly, he gave me the answer I wanted to hear.
“She’s my student. She’s quite frail, so she often collapses. But she was lucky this time. Last time, she was left unattended for nearly half a day and even caught the flu. Poor thing.”
Professor Lennon looked at Elisa in my arms with complex eyes.
It was a gaze mixed with multiple reasons that were not easily read.
Though I hadn’t met many people, I could tell because the color was so distinct.
“The room at the end of the corridor to the right of this lab is her room. Take her there. And please change her clothes too…”
“Johann, hand her over to me.”
“I’ll come along too.”
Don’t leave me here alone where I feel awkward.
But Renny ignored my desperate look and left the lab alone.
“There’s a chair over there, so have a seat.”
“…Before that, is there somewhere I can wash my hands?”
“There should be a sink over there.”
I immediately walked to the sink and scrubbed my hands with cucumber-scented soap.
Now the unpleasant feeling was gone.
Where was the chair?
Ah, there it is.
I pulled up a chair and sat down in a suitable spot.
Professor Lennon had lost interest in me and had resumed his work, opening the box containing the cursed object we had brought.
Seeing that he had completely lost interest in me, it seemed he wasn’t very interested in me.
I quietly folded my arms and leaned back in the chair, staring blankly at the ceiling.
The witch.
A witch, huh.
The entrance ceremony, the Hell Hound incident, and then the demon summoning episode.
What was the next episode again?
I could remember quite a few episodes, but it was hard to recall the exact order.
Including the sub-stories along with the main story, it was a game that took about 80 hours to reach the ending.
Naturally, there were many main quests as well.
I could immediately recall the demon summoning episode because it was quite impactful.
It was the episode where the first real bad ending branch existed in this game.
Although the Hell Hound incident had a bad ending, it was close to a tutorial-level difficulty in the original, so it was hard for anyone but a complete novice to see the bad ending.
In fact, the X-team achievement rate reached nearly 78%, showing how many people cleared it.
But the demon summoning episode’s difficulty suddenly spiked to 50% compared to the previous episode.
Stronger monsters, annoying gimmicks, and even time limits.
You could say it was full of elements that made clearing troublesome.
So while it was infamous as a newbie-killing episode, that was only by newbie standards.
For a veteran like me, I remembered all the information about that episode… uh… come to think of it, I don’t remember much?
If I tried to recall the main flow as much as I could remember: traces of a strange ritual were found on campus, several students went missing, and ultimately a demon was summoned using a student as a medium.
The ‘witch’ referred to the student possessed by that demon.
…If she hadn’t been wearing a school uniform, it would have been hard to even determine her gender due to how deformed and twisted she had become.
It was an episode where if you controlled the protagonist and companions to kill the ‘witch’ encountered in that state, it would end on an unsettling note with Karina mourning the victims.
It was quite infamous as a bitter and unsettling episode, causing a lot of mixed reactions.
That’s why at one point, veterans dug deep trying to find out the backstory of that episode.
But even the veterans couldn’t find out who the victim who turned into the witch was.
There was strangely little information, as if someone had erased it.
The only information the veterans found was that the student who became the witch didn’t have very good relationships with her peers, and that she was truly a being with ‘witch’ blood flowing through her veins.
…But now I had to find this witch first and become friends with her?
“…This is an unfair challenge if I’ve ever seen one.”
At least throw me some solid hints.
Why do you want to make my life not just hell difficulty, but inferno difficulty?
Wasn’t 10 years of suffering enough?
Life is such a fu-
“Hey, you there.”
“…Are you talking to me?”
“Who else is here besides you?”
“…That’s true.”
Why was he stopping his work to talk to me?
Was he bothered by my muttering?
When I looked at Professor Lennon questioningly, he was cleaning his glasses with a cloth as he asked me,
“Do you know about curses?”
“I don’t.”
“Curses are a collection of intense hatred. One can only cast a curse if they truly hate someone. That’s why to use a curse, one must swallow the curse of hatred themselves.”
Hatred… huh.
Well, if one wasn’t that obsessed, they probably wouldn’t even think of casting a curse.
But why was he telling me this?
Perhaps my face showed my confusion, as Professor Lennon kindly explained why he had brought this up.
“It’s something an escort knight should know. It’s also just idle chat while taking a break.”
What a professor-like topic for idle chat.
“I see.”
“Getting back to the story… Because hatred is used as fuel for curses, curses have been taboo for a very long time. It was common practice to immediately behead anyone who used curses. So those who used curses went into hiding. The leaders of the Kalon faith wanted to eliminate curses from this world entirely, but they failed time and time again.
They were as persistent as weeds.
How they managed to survive went back hundreds of years…”
Was he more starved for conversation than I thought?
Professor Lennon’s lecture on curses continued endlessly.
So much information was being crammed into my ears that it was hard to keep my senses.
At this rate, I might prefer fighting the hydra again.
Renny… come back quickly.
This is a crisis.
I can’t escape on my own because I’m alone!
In the end, it was our brown-haired tanned female knight Renny who saved me from this crisis.
Renny, who appeared opening the door, looked at me and the professor with a face full of puzzlement.
“Professor, I’m back. But why do you look like that?”
“…It’s just that my head hurts from listening to a lecture for the first time in a while.”
“Ah…”
Renny nodded as if she understood my feelings.
It seemed Renny had also suffered through the professor’s sudden lecture times before.
Well, I guess he didn’t do this just to me.
“Is Elisa alright?”
“Well… she just fainted, so I just washed her up and changed her clothes.”
“Thank you. Being a man, I find it quite awkward when such situations arise…”
It certainly was uncomfortable.
“…I’d like to see Lady Karina now, if possible.”
“Alright. Follow me.”
We followed Professor Lennon and entered through a door in the corner of the lab.
Judging by the faint smell of medicine, it seemed to be a room used as an infirmary.
I finally saw Karina lying on a bed placed on one side of the room after a very long time.
Karina was sleeping like the princess in the sleeping forest.
…When would she be able to wake up?
If Karina didn’t wake up, everything would go wrong.
“Lady Karina…”
At some point, Renny had taken Karina’s hand and was gently stroking the back of it.
“We’ve removed most of the curse, and now only the core remains. The core is lodged in her heart, so we can’t easily remove it, which is causing the delay… but I stake my honor on lifting the curse that’s eating away at the Saint.”
Professor Lennon’s words came from behind.
The heaviest words I had heard today.
With thoughts of the witch and Karina jumbling in my mind and making me dizzy, I could only nod my head.
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